Reflecting on something Rob said in yesterday's meeting, I think the
way that choice is dealt with in draft-livingood-dns-redirect could be
improved. Whether subscribers are opting in to DNS redirection or not
obviously has a huge impact on how the practice is judged.
In the current draft, the four flavors of redirect (web error,
malicious sites, legally mandated and content-based) are articulated
as somewhat comparable alternatives. But the last two are actually
qualitatively different from a choice perspective: it seems highly
unlikely that legally mandated redirection would be operated with any
choice mechanism at all, and based on the description of content-based
redirection, it seems to be describing a purely opt-in service. At the
same time, the requests that are subject to redirection in both of
those cases seem to be largely unbounded. A legal mandate could apply
to any URL (assuming legal authorities act arbitrarily), and a user
could choose to avoid any content. This is, by definition, not true
for the other two redirect flavors.
I understand the desire to avoid discussing opt-in/opt-out mechanisms
in much detail, but it seems like the broader notion that something
users choose for themselves is less objectionable that something that
is chosen on their behalf should be stated up front. This would also
help distinguish legally mandated and content-based redirection (where
the type of choice offered is more or less implicit) from web error
and malicious sites (where the ISP has a decision to make about how
choice will be offered).
Alissa
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