On 6 May 2014, at 22:34, Doug Barton <do...@dougbarton.us> wrote: > You could say that I'm arguing 'ad absurdum' here, but I'm not. There really > are such things as bad ideas, and it's perfectly reasonable for the IETF to > decide that something is a bad idea, and shouldn't be done. Or at least, > shouldn't be made easier to do.
Consider the two possible outcomes: (a) use of edns-client-subnet effectively involves a large depth of undocumented experience and knowledge about specific implementations and where those specific implementations are used. Use of the option is constrained to applications supported by big money or big government, since no individual (e.g. unfunded, open source) implementer can realistically hope to understand such a moving target with accuracy. The extent to which end-user privacy is affected in the big picture is difficult to characterise since the landscape is so fluid. (b) use of edns-client-subnet is documented, oddities that come up following implementation are rolled into the documentation, and we have a stable resource that exactly describes how the option works against which interop testing has half a chance of bearing fruit, and using which privacy implications can be easily understood. I think (b) is preferable to (a). >> (And again, see NAT.) > > So NAT is an interesting case, since there's no doubt that the IETF dropped > the ball on that. But the problem there was not that the IETF chose not to > act in order to not support NAT, the problem there was that the collective > decision process failed by determining that NAT was a bad idea. NAT *is* a bad idea. And the amount of global effort required to work around the differences in every implementation is absurd, now that it has become a de-facto implementation standard in IPv4 networking. > The remedy to that error is not to swing the pendulum all the way in the > other direction, and support every idea no matter how bad. The answer is to > make better decisions. The IETF has documented lots of protocols that nobody uses. Those are, by reasonable measure of uptake, bad protocols. The IETF is not the packet police. De-centralisation of innovation is what led to the phone network becoming an Internet application, rather than the other way round. "The mission of the IETF is to make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet." Joe _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
