Subject: Re: Continuing the story - another stab at an IETF mission statement

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 11:47:16 -0800

--On 18. februar 2004 18:06 +0000 Tom Petch <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> I find your definition of the Internet delightfully ambiguous.  I was
> taught that the Internet (as opposed to an internet or the internet) was
> the public network accessible through public IPv4 addresses (this predates
> IPv6) ie the Internet ceased at a firewall or other such IP level gateway.

I certainly agree on the "ambiguous", but not with the "delightful" :-)
>
> Reading your definition, I cannot tell where you stand; are firewalls and
> networks behind them included in IETF mission or not?

Here, I feel that I stand firmly on the quicksand left by those who have 
gone before... if you read Dave Crocker's 1995 RFC 'To be "on" the 
Internet' (RFC 1775), you will see that the problem is not a new one.

Luckily for us, "mediated access" and "messaging access" are mostly things 
of the past - but in my opinion, the Internet extends to the applications 
run by the people who have "client access" to the Internet.

After all, the Internet model is an end-to-end service; if the Internet 
stopped at the gateway/NAT box/firewall, it would be an end-to-firewall 
service for >90% of today's Internet traffic - and that doesn't make sense 
to me.

So in my opinion, firewalls and the networks behind them are part of the 
Internet, because we have to design for the Internet that is there, even as 
we labor to make it more like the Internet we want to have.
(now, is that sufficient straddling of the NAT debate? :-)

                         Harald