net.terrorism
Timothy J. Salo
salo at saloits.com
Wed Jan 10 19:41:39 UTC 2001
> Subject: Re: net.terrorism
> Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 04:37:37 -0800
> From: Paul A Vixie <vixie at mfnx.net>
> [...]
> why are we discussing this on nanog?
Well, it sounds like an operational issue.
As described in the original post, a group is disrupting Internet
connectivity to some destinations to achieve certain policy objectives.
This has a number of adverse implications.
o Policy-based "disconnectivity", like any other source of
connectivity problems, makes the Internet appear less reliable
and less predictable to the end user. Only a relatively
sophisticated end user can differentiate broken connectivity
caused by policies from other sources of connectivity problems.
Adding yet another cause of difficult-to-diagnose connectivity
problems hardly seems like a good thing.
o Whatever the official marketing literature may say, the
effectiveness of routing-based disconnectivity is generally
based to a large extent on inflicting pain on third parties.
That is, if the policy-based disconnectivity causes enough
pain to enough people, then the originating network or ISP will
have an incentive ("be forced") to remove the activity that violates
the policy. This basic strategy hardly seems like a good thing.
o Policy-based disconnectivity techniques would appear to set a bad
precedent. That is, this activity tends to legitimize the use
by ISPs of black-hole routing to enforce various acceptable use
policies. To the extent that the network community endorses
black-hole routing as an acceptable tool for enforcing anti-spam
policies, the technique is more likely to be applied in the
enforcement of other policies. For example, French courts could
conceivably decree a policy-based disconnectivity solution to
protect users in France from auction sites selling Nazi memorabilia
(i.e., Yahoo). (After all, if the technique is acceptable for
relatively minor social ills like spam, then surely it is
acceptable to use it for more significant social problems). German
courts could conceivably require German ISPs to black-hole foreign
"hate" sites.
(By the way, I believe that a number of prominent organizations
have taken stands against the filtering based on content of certain
foreign sites by some totalitarian countries. I don't think these
organizations are are saying that it is wrong to filter based on
political content, but OK to filter on, for example, less-political
content such as spam. )
I believe that legitimizing the use of "disconnectivity" techniques
(whether they are routing-based or filter-based and whether they
are "voluntary" [voluntary to whom?] or mandatory) to further
policy objectives is a really bad thing.
It is not altogether obvious to me that the cure is not worse than the
disease in this case.
-tjs
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