Subject: What exactly is an internet (service) provider?

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 11:42:23 +0200

Hi,

at least here in Germany Internet providers tend to 
do and not to do what they want.

- Some cut off their clients every 24 hours (DSL)

- Some block or slowdown particular tcp ports 
  to get rid of peer-to-peer file sharing

- Some redirect the first web access to any site
  to their own to force you to read their ads

- Very few support multicast. When I asked my 
  own provider, they didn't even know what this is.
  (They said 'no, because they don't support Linux'.)

- IPv6? Huh? What's that? 

- At least one large provider blocks port 25 to certain IP 
  addresses in order to force you to use the provider's 
  mail relay and have the sender e-mail address replaced
  by the customers default address at the provider's domain.
  They say it's against spam, but I guess it's because they
  take money for opening the port and allowing to use
  SMTP and such any sender domain.

- ...

So it would be good to have some kind of 
standard or definition, what exactly an 
internet provider has to do and what to refrain 
from.

Is there any? If not, shouldn't there be one? 
E.g. as an RFC?

regards
Hadmut

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 20:51:53 +0930

Hi Hadmut,

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 11:42:23 +0200

> internet provider has to do and what to refrain 

I tend to come up with the answer to your question the following way :

(Q) What is the "Internet" ?

(A) A global network that runs the "Internet Protocols", and follows the
Internet architecture.

(Q) What is the Internet architecture ?

(A) It is described in RFC1958 - "Architectural Principles of the Internet"
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1958.html).

(Q) What does an Internet Service Provider do ?

(A) Provides access to the "Internet".

(Q) What if the "Internet Service Provider" doesn't provide access to the
Internet in a way that follows RFC1958 ?

(A) They aren't providing access to the Internet, so I think they shouldn't be
calling themselves an "Internet" service provider.

A number of things you describe, such as blocking port 25, redirecting URLs
etc. do not follow RFC1958. I don't consider those organisations to be
true ISPs, and I don't give them my "Internet" access business, as they don't
seem to be prepared to properly provide it.

Regards,
Mark.

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 08:44:00 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>

> (Q) What is the "Internet" ?

I prefer the definitions of various kinds of "Internet service" in
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klensin-ip-service-terms-02.txt

Today, providers that sell sevices to users of Microsoft systems and
do not pay exquisite attention to which of them are infected with the
latest worms and viruses must block and redirect port 25 to their own
SMTP servers and so not provide what that draft calls "Full Internet
Connectivity."

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 07:41:45 +0900

> Is there any? If not, shouldn't there be one? 

Here is an old Internet Draft, which IESG at that time refused
to make it RFC, because some wanted to call NAT providers ISPs.

					Masataka Ohta

--
INTERNET DRAFT                                                   M. Ohta
draft-ohta-isps-00.txt                     Tokyo Institute of Technology
                                                               July 2000

                         The Internet and ISPs

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that
   other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
   Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (May/1/2000).  All Rights
   Reserved.

Abstract

   This memo gives definitions on the Internet and ISPs (Internet
   Service Providers).

1. The Internet

   The Internet is a public IP [1, 2] network globally connected end to
   end [3] at the Internetworking layer.

2. ISPs

   A network provider is an ISP, if and only if its network, including
   access parts of the network to its subscribers, is a part of the
   Internet.

   As such, ISPs must preserve the end to end and globally connected
   principles of the Internet at the Internetworking layer.

M. Ohta                Expires on January 1, 2001               [Page 1]

INTERNET DRAFT                    ISPs                         July 2000

   A network provider of a private IP or non-IP network, which is
   connected to the Internet through an application and/or transport
   gateway is not an ISP.

   Dispit the requirement of "global connectivity", a network provider
   may use transparent firewalls to the Internet with no translation to
   filter out a limited number of problematic well known ports of TCP
   and/or UDP and can still be an ISP.  However, if filtering out is a
   default and only a limited number of protocols are allowed to pass
   the firewalls (which means snooping of transport/application layer
   protocols), it can not be regarded as full connectivity to the
   Internet and the provider is not an ISP.

3. Security Considerations

   While some people may think that filtering by application/transport
   gateways offer some sort of security, they should recognize that
   macro virus in e-mails can pass and are passing through all such
   gateways.

4. References

   [1] J. Postel, "Internet Protocol", RFC791, September 1981.

   [2] S. Deering, R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6)
   Specification", RFC2460, December 1998.

   [3] B. Carpenter, "Architectural Principles of the Internet",
   RFC1958, June 1996.

5. Author's Address

   Masataka Ohta
   Computer Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
   2-12-1, O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, JAPAN

   Phone: +81-3-5734-3299
   Fax: +81-3-5734-3415
   EMail: [email-masked]

M. Ohta                Expires on January 1, 2001               [Page 2]

INTERNET DRAFT                    ISPs                         July 2000

6. Full Copyright Statement

   "Copyright (C) The Internet Society (July/1/2000).  All Rights
   Reserved.

   This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
   others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
   or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
   and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
   kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
   included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
   document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
   the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
   Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
   developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
   copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
   followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
   English.

   The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
   revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

   This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
   "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
   TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
   BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
   HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
   MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

M. Ohta                Expires on January 1, 2001               [Page 3]

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 07:44:31 +0900

> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klensin-ip-service-terms-02.txt

It confuses "Internet service" and "IP service" and calls
even a NAT provider ISP.

   In each case, the terminology refers to the intent of the
   provider (ISP)

It is not an acceptable definition.

   The definitions proposed here are clearly of little value if service
   providers and vendors are not willing to adopt them.  Consequently,
   the terms proposed are intended to not be pejorative,

The draft attempts to authorize NAT providers call themselves ISP.

Then, the NAT providers are willing to adopt it and just call
themselves not "web providers" but ISPs. So, the draft is
useless.

The only meaningful thing for IETF to do is define what is "ISP"
as a terminology within IETF.

There are a lot of IETF standard track documents of little value
ignored by service providers and vendors. So, don't bother.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 23:40:03 -0400

Ohta-san,

I do not expect that we will agree on this, and may need to
simply agree to disagree, but, having just reviewed the draft
you included in your slightly earlier not, let me try to explain
the other point of view, and why the I-D to which Vernon refers
is written the way it is and, in the process, I hope, respond to
some of Hadmut's concerns...

The IETF has absolutely not ability to insist that an provider
of IP services, or various good or bad or terrible
approximations to IP servers, do or not do anything.  If we were
to establish a document that said, e.g., "you are not an ISP,
and must not call yourself an ISP, unless you conform to the
following rules", I would expect the low-service providers to
simply ignore us.   That helps no one.

Instead, I think there are only two courses of action that have
a chance of making progress on this issue.  And I think they are
complementary, rather than competing, actions.

First, Hadmut, and others with his concerns in other countries,
probably need to approach the local regulatory authorities who
are concerned about consumer fraud and say "the range of things
that people are selling under the name 'Internet service'
includes too broad a range.  People are confused, and suppliers
are insisting that people make long-term commitments to
particular providers with any real idea what they are getting,
and that is poor public policy and you should do something about
it".

Second, the IETF should consider standardizing (or making a BCP
out of) some terminology similar to that in the I-D.  The intent
of that document is to lay a foundation for encouraging service
providers to explain what they are offering in language that
people can understand and, if the local/national regulators
think it appropriate, telling service providers what they need
to disclose and in what terms.  

Whether we like it or not, there are users (of what those users
think of as "the Internet") who would be perfectly happy with a
web-only, all outbound protocols but HTTP and HTTPS blocked, all
inbound ports blocked except responses to the above, private
address space, and all connections dropped and a new address
assigned every half-hour "service"... as long as it is cheap
enough.  I wouldn't want such a "service", I gather Vernon
wouldn't, and you probably wouldn't want it either.  But I don't
see a problem with those who want it getting it, as long as no
one is deceiving them (or anything else) about what they are
getting.   

And it is precisely the "no lying about why you are selling"
aspect of this that the I-D is addressed to, not an (almost
certainly useless) attempt to proscribe particular services or
terminology.

regards,
    john

--On Sunday, 20 June, 2004 07:44 +0900 Masataka Ohta
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>    The definitions proposed here are clearly of little value
> if service    providers and vendors are not willing to adopt
> them.  Consequently,    the terms proposed are intended to not
> be pejorative,
> 
> The only meaningful thing for IETF to do is define what is
> "ISP" as a terminology within IETF.
> 
> There are a lot of IETF standard track documents of little
> value ignored by service providers and vendors. So, don't
> bother.
> 
> 							Masataka Ohta
> 
> 
>

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 17:35:02 +0900

John C Klensin;

You made, at least, two mistakes, minor and major ones.

A minor mistake is that you think you can let people outside
of IETF use your terminology, if you give loose enough
terminlogy.

As you introduce "Web connectivity", such people (including
mobile operators in Japan) claim that they are ISPs, because
they are offering web connectivity over X.25 without IP. That
is, "The definitions proposed here are clearly of little value
if service providers and vendors are not willing to adopt them."
is applicable to your draft.

A major mistake is that you are forcing people within IETF
use your terminology even though you are fully aware that
"some members of the IETF community that some of these
connectively models are simply "broken" or "not really an
Internet service"".

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 19:42:48 +0930

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 23:40:03 -0400
John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:

> approximations to IP servers, do or not do anything. 

I agree that the IETF doesn't have the right to tell private, commercial
organisations how to run their business, and what types of services they can
or can't offer customers.

However, I think the IETF are in the position to make statements to the effect
that if "Internet" services are being offered in a manner that doesn't follow
the operational design and architecture of the Internet Protocols, as
outlined in RFC1958, then the end users of those services only have available
to them a limited subset of the features, benefits and capabilities of the
Internet. We are discussing IETF designed and developed protocols, which I
think puts the IETF in a position to state how they _should_ be used.

It also appears that the IAB are willing to make statements discouraging
certain practices, such as port filtering. Such a statement is at the
following URL :

"IAB concerns against permanent deployment of edge-based filtering"
http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-10-18-edge-filters.html

 If we were
> to disclose and in what terms.  

Bare in mind that documenting something in an RFC, even if the majority of the
IETF disagree with it, is commonly interpreted as giving it a level of
legitimacy. I've found that a lot of networking people in the enterprise/ISP
world (a) don't read RFCs and (b) consider that something being listed as in
an RFC automatically implies the blessing of the IETF / IESG / IAB.

For example, the original NAT RFC (RFC1631) contains the following
statement :

--
4. Conclusions

   NAT may be a good short term solution to the address depletion and
   scaling problems. This is because it requires very few changes and
   can be installed incrementally. NAT has several negative
   characteristics that make it inappropriate as a long term solution,
   and may make it inappropriate even as a short term solution. Only
   implementation and experimentation will determine its
   appropriateness.
--

How many people who bought "RFC 1631" compliant NAT boxes were aware that the
value of the solution documented in RFC1631 was considered questionable by
the authors of the RFC itself? I'd suspect very few. I know I though it was a
good idea for a while, until I got burned by it.

> enough.

I think these innocent and naive users are really being done a disservice.
The Internet is and will be far more capable that just these services - the
current architecture ensures that. I think it is important that the more
knowledgable attempt to ensure that the innocent are not taken advantage of,
nor denied access to the full capabilities that the Internet achitecture
provides.

Regards,
Mark.

---

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 12:45:19 +0200

On Sat, Jun 19, 2004 at 11:40:03PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:

> includes too broad a range.

Correct in principle, but no chance to do it in reality.

If I contact the regulatory authorities, they will ask
me "What's wrong with those ISP's?"

I answer "They do... and the don't..."

They'd say: Uhm, we're familiar with the Internet in 
common, but not with all those details. Most people seem 
to be happy with that, and if not, why don't you change to
a provider of your taste? We don't see why there is a need
to change the status quo of ISPs. 

I'd reply: Because that's not correct. This is not "Internet". 
This is some approx. This causes technical problems. This is 
fraud.

They'd say: Who are you to tell what's correct and what's 
"Internet"? Nobody has ever defined that term. If there
is no definition, then there is no "correct" or "not correct".

But if we had a precise definition and a taxonomy of the 
different classes of ISPs, I could say: Look, the 
IETF has given a definition. They're the guys who
control the internet and keep it running well. They
are exactly the ones to tell what's correct and 
what's not. And now, some of those german providers
are violating law. Because they are actually advertising
to provide internet, what they in fact don't do. 
False advertising is unlawful. 

regards
Hadmut

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 22:43:58 +0900

Hadmut Danisch;

Do you think a NAT provider an ISP?

> different classes of ISPs,

Then, all the IP and non-IP providers can now leagaly (some
illegaly a little beyond the scope of so generous RFC) say
they are ISPs and most end users have no chance to know the
differences of the taxonomy.

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Nathaniel Borenstein <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 10:33:52 -0400

It seems to me that there is genuine value in having the IETF define 
terms that distinguish the various types of connectivity, not because 
the IETF can (or should try) to enforce anything, but to provide 
authoritative normative terminology that might, in some jurisdictions, 
help provide a legal basis for egregious cases of false advertising.

In particular, it would be nice to have *some* term like "Full internet 
Connectivity" that defines the high-end service that really can't be 
credibly claimed by the lower-end services.   I'm skeptical, however, 
that we can rescue the term "ISP" from the low-end services that 
already claim that label.  Rather than fight over the pre-existing term 
"ISP", why not try to converge on a new term with a more clearly 
defined meaning from day one, based on a document from the IETF?  After 
all, the low-end services can legitimately claim to provide *some* 
Internet services, just not *most* of them, which makes them in some 
sense "Partial ISP's" and unlikely to give up the "ISP" label 
willingly.    Instead, we could invent (and try to popularize) a new 
term such as "Complete High-End Internet Service Providers" (CHISPs) or 
"Providers of Internet General Services" (PIGS).  :-)

Anyway, I fear that trying to convince a bunch of low-end providers not 
to call themselves ISPs is about hopeless as trying to convince people 
who believe in massive budget deficits and preemptive wars not to call 
themselves conservatives.  -- Nathaniel

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 09:12:55 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>

> they are offering web connectivity over X.25 without IP. 

WebTV is functionally the same as web connectivity over X.25 without
IP.  Most of the world thinks that part of Microsoft is an "ISP."
Nothing the IETF or even governments could do would change that.

>                                                          That

Those involved call the services of WebTV either "WebTV" or "Internet
service."  Professionals (including salespeople) who are not employed
by Microsoft in the WebTV operation, especially competitors, would be
happy to call it "Web Connectivity" instead of "WebTV."  Even Microsoft
might like "Web Connectivity" to limit dilution of its "WebTV" trademark.

Thus such concerns are irrelevant to "Web Connectivity."
You'd do better attacking one of the other categories.

> connectively models are simply "broken" or "not really an

No, the major mistake is thinking the various classes of IP service
do not exist or that you can keep people from naming them with short
English words or phrases.  As the various classes become more popular
and widely recognized, the world will invent and use terms for them.
No one but pedants and marketers will care which words or phrases are
ultimately chosen.  The IETF can speed up and slightly steer the choice,
but no one can prevent it.  We got to choose the word "Internet" but
did not entirely control the definition (recall small 'i' "internet").
We lost on "intranet" "catnet" and many other terms.

The useful things that this draft might accomplish are:

 - make the choice of terms happen within or a year instead of the
    years that the current definition "Internet" needed.

 - make the people who have more control than the IETF over the choice
    of terms for the emerging clases Internet service think about the
    words they want.  They are in marketing organizations.

Consumer ISPs are not offering the kinds or classes of IP service that
I would want.  It is insane to ignore that reality.  It would be little
better to insist that governments will not eventually get involved or
that there will be no common terms for the various common classes of
IP services and ISPs.

]  From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>

]  > But if we had a precise definition and a taxonomy of the 
]  > different classes of ISPs,
] 
]  Then, all the IP and non-IP providers can now leagaly (some
]  illegaly a little beyond the scope of so generous RFC) say
]  they are ISPs and most end users have no chance to know the
]  differences of the taxonomy.

No, 
  - Whatever happens with this draft, it will not have anything like
     the force of law.  The IETF does not have powers over terms
     equivalent to the groups that name species, chemical compounds,
     and astronomical bodies.

  - all the IP and non-IP providers in most of the world can now
     legally call themselves "ISPs."  The IETF could not change that.

  - The terms the world eventually uses for the various classes of IP
     service and types of ISPs will differ from the consensus of the
     IETF.  This draft can only crystalize the choices.  Seed crystals
     influence the shape of a solid, but do not control it.

  - the main reason "end users have no chance to know the differences"
     delineated by the taxonomy is that the taxonomy does not yet
     exist.  When it exists, users will know as much of it as they
     care to, just as they now know or don't know the differences among
     "web," "Internet," and "telephone." 

     Users who do not distinguish between "web" and "Internet" also
     think "WebTV" is Internet service.  IETF cannot change that.  That
     VoIP, text messaging, and cell phones are changing the definitions
     of "telephone" and "telephone company" is part of my point.

Much of the good this draft might do will be done simply by discussing
in public differences among IP service classes and choices of terms.
After the taxonomy is crystalized, it will be out of the IETF's control.

---

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 09:52:51 -0700 (PDT)

Much as I understand the moral outrage that NATs cause in some people's
mind, NATs are still a reality AND they (usually anyway) provide
connectivity to the Internet. Have you tried using a hotelroom Ethernet
port or a WiFi network recently? I can't remember the last time I was
assigned something that looked like a "real" routable IP address, but
as a consumer of paid-for Internet service (that works) is there any
reason (apart from religion) that I should care??

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Academic Research and Technology Initiatives, Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   GSM: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: [email-masked]  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

---

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 19:37:14 +0200

> reason (apart from religion) that I should care??

That's currently a consequence of the shortage of IP addresses. 
With IPv4 not every hotel or restaurant can have a Class-C address
range. Unfortunately, this shortage doesn't make people ask for
IPv6, but makes them getting used to have such NATs, and even 
more, it appears to be an advantage, because it gives kind of 
protection to unprotected windows machines. Internet is becoming 
decadent.

However, such a service might be sufficient as long as you just
poll your e-mail or visit the web from your hotel room. Would you 
be happy with it at home? What if you need an open port? 
What if you want to receive multicast packages? What if you want
to contact someone else who also has a NAT provider? What if
you want to receive instant messages, e-mail notifications,
peer-to-peer services?

With such providers Internet is not anymore what it used and was 
supposed to be. Internet means (at least in my opinion) that in 
principle every node can comunicate with every other node.

Clients behind NAT can't communicate with other such clients. 
Internet is split into clients and servers, where clients can 
communicate with servers only. No peer to peer anymore. 

Do we consider this as "internet"? 

Hadmut

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 11:49:01 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Ole Jacobsen 

> reason (apart from religion) that I should care??

If you have no reason to care, then you shouldn't, except that Full
Internet connectivity is significantly more expensive to provide.  It's
not the bits that are more expensive, but the people who deal with the
naughty bits that come with Full Internet Connectivity.

If you have a technical reason to care, perhaps because you need to
run an application not understood by the NAT systems of your hotel,
then you ought to be able to distinguish what you need from what you
are getting while talking to people who have never heard of the IETF.
Perhaps you would like to run applications that talk to systems back
at the factory and that use protocols that don't always play with NAT.
Maybe you are a system admninistrator who needs to check your DCC servers
(anti-spam system), despite your hotel's filters against UDP port 6277.
Perhaps you need to check your DNS servers despite your hotel's filters
and redirection of port 53 or all UDP.  Maybe you just need SSH and
didn't remember to set an sshd listening to port 443 before you left.
Maybe you need to talk to port 25 on your SMTP server to see if it is
sick.  Talk about ALGs, UDP, TCP, and even NAT is cybercrud noise to
a hotel desk clerk.  However, you might someday be able to say "please
upgrade the Internet service for room 1234 from Web Connectivity to
Full Internet Connectivity."

You don't expect airline ticket agents to understand or care what
you're talking about if you go on about stall speeds, rates of sink
or climb, and so forth, but asking for a ticket on a "communter airline"
instead of a "wide body" can be useful.

There is absolutely no chance of less filtering in hotels, 802.11 hot
spots, etc.  There will be terms that distinguish those kind of
Internet service from what many of us consider the real thing.  The
issue is whether we must wait for the market to provide equivalents
to "ham radio," "CB radio," "satellite radio," "AM," "FM," "TV," and
"cell phone."  Arguing against the idea of draft is like saying
"the term 'electormagnetic radiation' is good enough."

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:07:36 -0400

--On Sunday, 20 June, 2004 12:45 +0200 Hadmut Danisch
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> First, Hadmut, and others with his concerns in other
>> countries, probably need to approach the local regulatory
>> authorities who are concerned about consumer fraud and say
>> "the range of things that people are selling under the name
>> 'Internet service' includes too broad a range.
> 

While I don't precisely agree with parts of your description in
that paragraph (e.g., the IETF really doesn't "control the
Internet") that is precisely why draft-klensin-ip-service-terms
was written.  The questions, I think, are:

	* Is it right, or at least "good enough" given that goal?
	
	* What does the IESG want to do to process it, and when?
	
	* Can we move forward with something like that, with all
	of its inperfections, rather than getting bogged down in
	debates about changing things we can't possibly change,
	religion about various practices that exist and that
	people profit by selling, and alternate realities in
	which the IETF can actually dictate what people should
	do to be "legal".

"Can we "make" or "force" anyone to use an particular terms?" is
explicitly not on that list.  It wouldn't be a good idea, and
the answer is "no" anyway.

I don't know the answer to any of those questions. The draft was
posted just as an attempt to begin moving toward answers on all
three, rather than just having periodic discussions of how much
nicer the world would be if it were different.

And, without having any idea about the specific situation in
Germany, I would hope that, in many countries, were such a list
of terms and definitions standardized, it would be possible to
go to the regulators and say "Ok, here is a definition from a
recognized standards group with some plausible credentials for
understanding the Internet.  It defines some service
distinctions and why knowledge about those distinctions is
likely to be useful to an educated consumer trying to make
choices*.  I think that it would be useful if you either
required providers to supply information about their services in
those terms, or at least to establish the principle that using
the terms in misleading ways will be considered fraudulent".
We actually might make some progress that way.

	* The area of "why someone should care about these
	terms" is not, IMO, sufficiently handled in the
	document.   Text would be welcome as long as it
	maintains the tone of the document, i.e., that it avoid
	denouncing anyone or anything other than lying about
	what is being offered.

As editor (at least temporarily) of the only draft in this area
that has been posted and that I consider realistic given
real-world realities, I want to again try to reinforce the
observation made by Ole and others.  There are services (or, if
you prefer, disservices) out there that real people are paying
real money for and using happily.  To tell the providers of
those services "you must be clear about what you are providing"
is reasonable and not intrinsically offensive: they have enough
of a market that they will probably presume they can sell them
even if they are described clearly.  To tell them "you can't
provide that service because they imply that no one will be able
to operate a full-capability, permanent-address server out of a
one-night-stay in a hotel room" is nonsense and will be treated
that way -- they will respond that no one wants to buy such a
thing and will be, to a first-order approximation, correct.

>From personal experience, if I check into a hotel and hook up to
the local Ethernet, or use a public hotspot, I'll happily use
services with characteristics that would be unthinkable for my
office connection and servers.  At the same time, if I discover
that those hotel or hotspot services won't permit me to run
tunnels back to my home servers, I'm going to be _really_
unhappy.  It is the disclosure that is important.   And,
personally, I'd consider it huge forward progress if I can call
up a hotel I'm contemplating staying in and say "do you provide
Internet service at level xyz" and get a straight, meaningful,
and reliable answer.  That requires only some standard
definitions and a certain amount of good faith.  Will some
hotels (and some [dis]service providers) lie?  Probably.  But
that is a problem the community will have to deal with in some
other way: I've checked into hotels that claim to be four-star
facilities and that don't come anywhere close, but word gets
around, regulators get irritated, and so on.  I think doing that
well --establishing sufficient criteria that one can say "you
are lying" without having the hotel or provider saying "there
are no definitions, so nothing we say is a lie"-- would be good
progress.

Not enough to create a utopia in which there are no NATs, no
filters, static addresses for the duration of a stay that I
could obtain along with my confirmation number,  and no attempts
to provide/claim "broadband" service in which a 500 room hotel
feeds into a single fractional T1, but a useful start.

    john

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:35:36 -0400

--On Sunday, 20 June, 2004 19:37 +0200 Hadmut Danisch
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> Much as I understand the moral outrage that NATs cause in
>> some people's mind, NATs are still a reality AND they
>> (usually anyway) provide connectivity to the Internet. Have
>> you tried using a hotelroom Ethernet port or a WiFi network
>> recently? I can't remember the last time I was assigned
>> something that looked like a "real" routable IP address, but
>> as a consumer of paid-for Internet service (that works) is
>> there any reason (apart from religion) that I should care??
> 

Actually, there is not a lot of evidence for this.  I suggest it
is partially a consequence of something else.  Let's assume I'm
a provider of "internet service" to a hotel chain or a random
collection of hotels.   It is in my interest to keep my actual
costs as low as possible, so that my hotel can compete with the
one down the block (to offer the same limited/lousy service, but
see below).  I need to assume that the folks who work in the
hotel on a day-to-day basis will know about as much about the
Internet as they do about fixing television sets.  Putting in an
expert drives my costs _way_ up.  Even sending out an expert to
provision the hotel has a serious impact on my costs. 

So, let's consider what I want to do.  I want to have an
absolutely standard kit that I can put on a truck with a field
service type whose level of training is "unpack boxes, plug in
router, plug in cables, plug in WAN feed, turn everything on,
perform a few very standard tests, return to truck".  I'd prefer
that even keying in an address for the hotel's WAN-side
connection and downstream router not be on that list.   The
state of the art today with IPv4, and, as I understand it,
pretty much with IPv6, is that I'm better off with a NAT and
private address space inside the hotel.  If the question of why
there aren't widely-supported DHCP or equivalent facilities by
which that entire hotel router (and its DHCP server and upstream
ports) can be trivially configured remotely, ask the DHC WG or
the Internet ADs, not me.  If you want to know why mail clients
can't be autoconfigured off DHCP with the hotel's local outbound
mail server, go take it up with the mail client vendors.  

But, until those sorts of problems are solved, please go read
Vernon's comments again: providers are providing these low end
services between that is what people want to buy and the price
they want to buy it at.  Higher levels of service would cost
more, maybe a lot more, mostly due to provisioning and support
costs and not, e.g., hardware costs or restrictions on IP
address availability.  And, while I have serious doubts that
there is a large market there, if we can make service term
descriptions a bit more clear, then I can imagine a hotel saying
"ok, we have two kinds of Internet service available,
'client-only' at $10/night and 'full' at $30/night -- pick what
you want and hand us your credit card".  Whether I'd be willing
to pay for the higher-end service or not, I'd far prefer being
offered that choice than "please give us your money and we will
deliver whatever we feel like and you can learn to like it".

> With such providers Internet is not anymore what it used and
> was  supposed to be. Internet means (at least in my opinion)
> that in  principle every node can comunicate with every other
> node.
> 

I don't.  My religion about this may not be very different from
yours, or even from Ohta-san's.  But the market has clearly
decided that people will buy such whatever-they-are-called
services and no amount of saying "naughty" or "inadequate" is
going to make them go away.   And we are more likely to get what
we do want --when we are willing to pay for it-- if we help
precisely those providers understand and sell both whatever they
are selling now and what you would consider adequate "Internet"
service.  Otherwise, as with most hotels and consumer
cable-modem and DSL providers today, the only thing available
will be the cheapest possible service (to provide) they can get
away with offering at whatever price they can get away with
charging for it.

      john

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 22:31:55 +0200

On 20-jun-04, at 19:37, Hadmut Danisch wrote:

>> Have you tried using a hotelroom Ethernet

Well, if you don't care that a soda is $6 and local calls from your 
room are more expensive than international ones from your office, why 
start here? But it's substandard service nonetheless.

> That's currently a consequence of the shortage of IP addresses.

There is no shortage of IP addresses. There are still more than a 
billion that have never been used.

However, there is a big policy/distribution problem, or in other words:

> range.

---

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:23:51 -0700 (PDT)

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

"But it's substandard service nonetheless."

Huh?

We can certainly have an argument about what is a reasonable price, but if
I can do *exactly* the same things (read/send e-mail, browse the web,
transfer files, make connections to remote hosts via SSH, listen to BBC
Radio 4, etc.) as I can from inside the corporate network, then what
exactly makes this NAT service "substandard"??

Sure, I probably won't be able to make my laptop be a web server, nor will
you be able to log into it from where you are, but who cares? That's NOT
what the typical business traveller wants and the service provided is a
lot more useful (and typically much cheaper) that the dialup alternative.

I am not advocating the use of NATs, I am just observing that NATs are a
fact of life and I have a hard time accepting that such a service cannot
be defined as "Internet service".

My home network is provided by a NAT too, but so far I have not found it
to be a huge problem. There are other services that I would like to see,
but they are prevented by policy and not by the NAT architecture per se.

I don't think the IETF should be in the business of defining what
constitues Internet service based on religion rather than reality.

Ole

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 07:16:47 +0900

Ole Jacobsen;

> exactly makes this NAT service "substandard"??

For example, how can you use mobile IP there?

> you be able to log into it from where you are, but who cares?

How can you receive IP telephony call on your laptop?

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 00:20:31 +0200

> Radio 4, etc.) as I can from inside the corporate network, then what

- How would you do a Voice-over-IP phone call with someone 
  else if both of you are in such a NAT-hotel-room?

- How do you join a multicast session (actually this is not 
  a matter of NAT, but of different levels of Internet services).

- I and some friends use a UDP based protocol to exchange 
  status messages with a central server. The next version 
  will allow to send notifications if mail has arrived 
  to avoid polling continuously. How would you do that?

  (I'm sometimes using IP over GRPS with my cellphone, where
  I receive a RFC1918 address, which is NATed. When I am awaiting
  an important e-mail, I have to poll every few minutes. Polling
  over GPRS is expensive. The provider which seems to be the cheaper
  could turn out to be more expensive.)

- How would you do IP-address based authorization 
  (e.g. RMX/SPF/CallerID) if other people can have the 
  same IP address at the same time?

- IPSec through NAT (if not UDP-encapsulated)?

- What about UDP or TCP protocols which run into the 
  NAT timeout?

- What about forensics? How do you track back an attack from 
  behind a hotel's NAT router?

I don't say that all hotels have to support full internet. 
But I'd like to know what I pay for in advance and decide 
whether it is sufficient for my needs before purchasing. 

I've never seen hotel staff people who could explain what's
going on there. But if you give things a name, then they 
can simple tell you what they offer without the need to 
understand anything. They just need to learn 
"We offer XXX service for x$ and YYY for y$".

And with home internet providers you can compare whether
the one for US$n-2 is really cheaper than the one with US$n.

regards
Hadmut

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 07:37:21 +0900

Nathaniel Borenstein;

> credibly claimed by the lower-end services.

If IETF successfully convince service providers that "Full internet
Connectivity" is the name of the high-end service, all the service
providers will call their service "Full internet Connectivity"
against which IETF can do nothing.

Vernon Schryver;

> However, you might someday be able to say "please

And the hotel operator will say "Sure, you can now access all the
Web pages including those containing adalt contents".

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 15:51:47 -0700 (PDT)

If by "IPSec" you mean what the marketing folks call VPN, then so far it
has worked just fine.

Muticast, VOIP and the rest of stuff you mention probably does NOT work,
but my point was that this is NOT what most business travellers want.

And, yes, I agree they should provide a matrix of what is available for
what cost.

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen

---

From: Florian Weimer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 09:21:44 +0200

> - Some cut off their clients every 24 hours (DSL)

This happens on the sub-IP layer and hasn't got to do much with ISPs.

>   to get rid of peer-to-peer file sharing

You get what you pay for.

>   to their own to force you to read their ads

Same here.

>   (They said 'no, because they don't support Linux'.)

You can't get reliable multicast service anywhere in the world.
People tend to switch it off if it threatens to impact unicast
traffic.  It's not possible to run production services over multicast
across the Internet at the moment, at least not without a fallback to
unicast.

> - IPv6? Huh? What's that? 

It's not a real problem to get native IPv6 over ADSL or SDSL.

>   mail relay

Which one is that?

The case you are writing about does *not* block 25/TCP on the TCP/IP
layer.

It's true that certain extremely cheap products don't offer that much
Internet or Service.  These products are marketed aggressively and are
usually sold at a loss.  Nobody forces you to buy them.

-- 
Current mail filters: many dial-up/DSL/cable modem hosts, and the
following domains: bigpond.com, di-ve.com, fuorissimo.com, hotmail.com,
jumpy.it, libero.it, netscape.net, postino.it, simplesnet.pt, spymac.com,
tiscali.co.uk, tiscali.cz, tiscali.it, voila.fr, yahoo.com.

---

From: Florian Weimer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:03:05 +0200

> That's currently a consequence of the shortage of IP addresses. 

There's no shortage of IPv4 addresses.  Today, it's not a problem to
get IP addresses if you have determined that NAT is not an option.

---

From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 17:42:46 +0930

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 15:51:47 -0700 (PDT)

> but my point was that this is NOT what most business travellers want.

A retorical question. How do business travellers know that they don't
want them, if they've never seen them demonstrated, because NAT limited the
availablility of them to the point where their availability couldn't be relied
upon.

Not only may the next "killer app" not be the next "killer app" because it
doesn't work with NAT, the next "killer app" may have already been invented a
year ago, but wasn't able to be deployed because of the prevalance of NAT. Not
only don't we know, we also don't know what we may be missing.

This is the problem with NAT - it appears to be a nice easy solution, until
you realise that the devil is in the details.

Keith Moore has put together a good list of the things NAT breaks at 

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/what-nats-break.html

a related document, also by Keith, which also addresses some issues influenced
by NAT is "Dubious Assumptions about IPv6"

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/ipv6/dubious-assumptions.html

Regards,
Mark.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 11:00:51 +0200

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 09:21:44AM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
...
> This happens on the sub-IP layer and hasn't got to do much with ISPs.
...
> You get what you pay for.
...
> Same here.
...
> You can't get reliable multicast service anywhere in the world.
...
> It's not a real problem to get native IPv6 over ADSL or SDSL.
...
> usually sold at a loss.  Nobody forces you to buy them.

You missed the point. This is not about complaining that I don't get
enough for the money. This is that I don't know in advance what
I do get for my money.

"Nobody forces you to buy them" is true only as long as I do 
know what exactly they offer and as it is my decision to buy
it or not. But if I buy "Internet" and don't see what I'm 
buying, then I don't have the choice.

I do not want to blame anyone for selling NAT access. 
I want him to give a clear statement about what he is 
selling.

regards
Hadmut

(And, btw, some of the statements are incorrect.
- Some providers intentionally cut their customers
  off after 24 hours in order to force them to have
  a new IP address.

- It is a real problem to get native IPv6 over DSL 
  in Germany. Some providers simply don't want to 
  provide IPv6, because they say "Internet" is IPv4.
)

---

From: "Christian de Larrinaga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:03:46 +0100

Again we run into the thorny old policy issue of viewing the user as merely
a captive consumer.

But what happens when it turns out that to consume you need to run an
application not "supported" by the intervening network?

This is clearly a break of the principle of end to end application
transparency that the IP layer provides. This does necessarily break the
semantic description of Internet Service Provider. But there is little to be
done arguing that point now.

The problem as a travelling user (or as a housebound German it seems) is you
don't know what you are going to be able to do until you try and as a hotel
or end node provider you may legally have an obligation to try to protect
your network from being a source of abuse by transients.

A traveller cannot change ISP easily so either will just have to accept some
things cannot be done or will find a way. As it happens one can preplan and
setup a proxy service or a tunnel broker etc that can get round many of
these issues.

Perhaps the IETF would be wiser to give a warning about the futility of
trying to break application transparency. "The Internet user may always find
a way to communicate on their own terms"

Christian

Christian de Larrinaga

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
Ole Jacobsen
Sent: 20 June 2004 23:52
To: Hadmut Danisch
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: What exactly is an internet (service) provider?

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 11:11:39 +0200

> exactly makes this NAT service "substandard"??

I'm not sure what you can and cannot do on your corporate network, but 
for me NAT gets in the way of some forms of streaming video (RTSP 
protocol), audio/video conferencing (SIP) and IPsec.

It's a real shame that software companies are spending their money on 
getting around this rather than create real innovation.

> be defined as "Internet service".

You can define it as "partially broken internet service".

> constitues Internet service based on religion rather than reality.

And I don't think the IETF should do anything that even comes close to 
endorsing NAT.

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 20:17:27 +0900

> only don't we know, we also don't know what we may be missing.

The next "killer app" a lot more important than Web for most
business people is the "Internet telephony", which may or may
not use IETF standard protocol.

Even though there are people who can not type, most of them
can use telephony (maybe over TDD).

And the second next "killer app" a lot more important than
Web for most people including, but not limited to, business
ones is "Internet TV", which may or may not use IETF or
Microsoft standard protocol.

It has already happened to millions of people in Japan initiated
by a commercial company and there will be tens and hundreds of
millions of people using them.

> you realise that the devil is in the details.

Yup. If you insist on NAT, you lose a lot of business chances.

I can proudly say that I helped the commercial company above get
global IPv4 addresses enough for millions of subscribers, which
was essential for their aggressive service.

The reality of life is that there are successful ISPs and there
are poor network providers insisting on NAT.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:09:14 +0930

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:03:46 +0100
"Christian de Larrinaga" <[email-masked]> wrote:

<snip>

> a way to communicate on their own terms"

... using the following tunnel broker / VPN peer. The neat thing about it is
that it uses SSL/TLS over UDP, and you can specify the UDP ports to use. As it
uses UDP to encapsulate the IP packets, the outer IP header can be NATted.

Also, as it uses UDP, and the ports are selectable, you may be able to "punch"
a pipe through a firewall, by using UDP ports #53 a.k.a. DNS, depending on how
well the firewall inspects DNS traffic. If that works out, "The Internet user
may always find a way to communicate on their own terms", irrespective of NAT.

http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/

Regards,
Mark.

---

From: shogunx <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 04:48:52 -0400 (EDT)

Ive been watching this thread for some time, and its time for me to pipe
in...

I've been working on a viable hotel solution for some time now, and the
best I have been able to come up with is a terminal server with thin
clients (bootp, tftp, xdmcp... you know the drill) in the guest rooms.
The clients are NATed, due to cost of address allocation.  They work fine
in this scenario, for the standard business traveler, as well as
providing universal access for everyone who does not carry a laptop.  For
someone who wants more and has their own hardware, the terminal server
also routes v6 packets, providing end to end connectivity.

Regarding the ISP filtering issue, I had to figuratively kick my local
cable provider in the head to get them to drop the port 80 block on my
circuit, and they list all of their non-"business class" IP's with a RBL
in order to force usage of their mail relays.

Its a sad situation.

Scott

> usually sold at a loss.  Nobody forces you to buy them.

sleekfreak pirate broadcast
http://sleekfreak.ath.cx:81/

---

From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:47:49 +0200

> may always find a way to communicate on their own terms", irrespective of NAT.

You are forgetting something very big here:
 Only the smart internet users will find a way out.

Normal users, the masses, the ones that bring in the cash, don't know
this. The smart ones will pick a real ISP anyways. The others bring in
enough cash that even though there are only a few doing the tunneling
thing the ISP doing this really doesn't care about those.
This are all just normal 'business cases' the same like saying "there
are not enough IP addresses thus you get only one" etc.
IETF can't do much about it, except making protocols that can't be
NATted and that are of the 'http' or 'p2p' rating, aka something that
all the users want but which can't work behind a NAT... enter IPv6 ;)

Also the above requires on to tunnel thus you are getting real service
from somebody else and basically using your current provider as the l2
provider.

The same is the issue with IPv6 Tunnel Brokers which can be seen as
ISP's in the fact that they provide IPv6 connectivity. Though the 'l2
medium' is the IPv4 connectivity of another ISP instead of ethernet or
cable.

Greets,
 Jeroen

---

From: "Dr Harsh Verma" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 08:01:10 -0700

Yes, with tunnel brokering and the ability to reverse-tunnel "Roaming" 
'Internet users should be able find a way to communicate on their own
terms', as they move in a "Mobile Environment" switching back-end
networks if required, for Mobile VPN.

Kudos to Cisco's Mobile Access Router 3200 for being  an example for
this architecture.

Yes, I had the pleasure of "piggyback" riding a WiFi network setup by a
neighbor while in a hotelroom in a remote, forsaken  place and in the
words of Ole, 'as a consumer of paid-for Internet service (that works)',
there was no reason for me to care and probably these rules set for user
terms will need to be integrated for policy to switch to another network
if I really have to pay. Somebody is paying, but there really ain't no
free lunch!

Regards,
Harsh Verma
Director, R&D, GLOCOL, Inc
Past Vice-Chair (Industry) R&D WG, NECCC
Member, Cross Boundary WG
Tel: +1(916)684-3262
E-Mail: [email-masked]  
www.glocol.net  

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Mark Smith
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2004 5:39 AM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: What exactly is an internet (service) provider?

<snip>

> A traveller cannot change ISP easily so either will just have to 
> accept some things cannot be done or will find a way. As it happens 
> one can preplan and setup a proxy service or a tunnel broker etc that 
> can get round many of these issues.
> 
> Perhaps the IETF would be wiser to give a warning about the futility 
> of trying to break application transparency. "The Internet user may 
> always find a way to communicate on their own terms"

... using the following tunnel broker / VPN peer. The neat thing about
it is that it uses SSL/TLS over UDP, and you can specify the UDP ports
to use. As it uses UDP to encapsulate the IP packets, the outer IP
header can be NATted.

Also, as it uses UDP, and the ports are selectable, you may be able to
"punch" a pipe through a firewall, by using UDP ports #53 a.k.a. DNS,
depending on how well the firewall inspects DNS traffic. If that works
out, "The Internet user may always find a way to communicate on their
own terms", irrespective of NAT.

Regards,
Mark.

---

From: Markus Stumpf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 21:30:03 +0200

Hoi Hadmut,

> I want him to give a clear statement about what he is 

You have a contract. This should be listed in the contract and you
can read it before signing it. If the contract doesn't talk about
limits and they do limit you, sue them.

Blocking Port 25 outgoing for DSL surf accounts is not a problem,
there is RFC 2476. If your email provider doesn't support message
submission ask them why.

>   off after 24 hours in order to force them to have

You have to look at what they sell. They sell "DSL Surf Accounts".
Surfers usually aren't online for 24 hours without interuption and
they don't have problems with the interupt in "normal use". If you get a
"business access" you will not have the problem in most of the cases.

>   provide IPv6, because they say "Internet" is IPv4.

You only have to look a bit harder ;-)

	\Maex

-- 
SpaceNet AG            | Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0
Research & Development |       D-80807 Muenchen    | Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299
"The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally
 proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin"

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 15:16:25 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Markus Stumpf 

> limits and they do limit you, sue them.

Sue on what grounds?  Who says that Internet service has no limits?
All reputable service providers have terms of service that include
limits, starting with something about network abuse.  (Never mind 
how well those limits are enforced.)  Many service providers limit
their users to not running "servers," but good luck finding someone
who knows what they mean by "server." 
Since there are always providers, you can't sue simply because you
bought an account with limits you failed to clarify.

Trying to find first line technical support people (never mind sales)
at a consumer grade ISP who knows has any idea what sort of filtering
their employer does is hopeless.  It's generally foolish to expect to
find someone who even understands the question.

> >   off after 24 hours in order to force them to have

(Some "DSL modems" including the Actiontec 1524 kill TCP connections
after an hour or two all by themselves)

> "business access" you will not have the problem in most of the cases.

I've not seen anyone selling "DSL Surf Accounts," but I've never looked,
and certainly not in Germany.

In any case, 
  - which of the classes in 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klensin-ip-service-terms-02.txt
    is closest to a "DSL Surf Accounts"?

 - Should one of those four categories be renamed "DSL Surf Accounts"?

 - Should a new class named be "DSL Surf Accounts" be added?

 - exactly what filtering is imposed on a "DSL Surf Account"?  Is
     port 25 filtered?   22?  135 and 138?  Some or all UDP?  ICMP?

 - and the same questions for "business access."

Telling people to read contracts ISP today is disingenuous.  If the
IETF would define "DSL Surf Accounts" and "business access," then you
could hope to ask for one or the other.  You might then sue if you
didn't get whichever you wanted.

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 07:15:02 +0900

Jeroen Massar

>  Only the smart internet users will find a way out.

The argument that the smart users can use IP over HTTP makes
John's classifications such as "web providers" unnecessary.

> from somebody else and basically using your current provider as the l2

There are a lot of Hotels claiming Internet capable only because
their rooms have extra RJ-11.

At Geneva, Internet capable hotel rooms have RJ-45, not for Ethernet
but for ISDN. :-|

IETF can not stop them claiming Internet capable.

So, let's call all the telephone companies ISPs.

Smart users can, just like having VPN servers, have modems at
home to establish dial-up connection to the Internet from
any PSTN telephone in the world.

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 19:12:21 -0400

--On Tuesday, 22 June, 2004 07:15 +0900 Masataka Ohta
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> Also the above requires on to tunnel thus you are getting
>> real service from somebody else and basically using your
>> current provider as the l2 provider.
> 
> There are a lot of Hotels claiming Internet capable only
> because their rooms have extra RJ-11.
> 
> At Geneva, Internet capable hotel rooms have RJ-45, not for
> Ethernet but for ISDN. :-|
> 

No, IETF can't.  But IETF can create definitions that help those
who want to be truthful about what they are providing do that,
in a way that is clear to themselves and their potential
customers.  Such definitions may also help folks with those RJ11
or ISDN connections understand why their customers get
frustrated and threaten to never return -- today, they are
mostly just bewildered.

If, with or without those definitions, someone is determined to
lie, they will certainly do that and IETF won't be able to do a
thing about it.  Perhaps local regulators and courts and
hotel-rating agencies will, but not IETF.

Let me give a specific example that leads me to believe there is
hope in at least some portions of this problem.  These days,
before making a hotel reservation, I routinely check on whether
they offer "Internet access".  As others have suggested, I don't
bother asking about NATs, funny filters, etc. -- the odds that
someone at the reservations desk will have a clue are about
zero.  But I do ask and, if I get a "no" answer, I'm reasonably
likely to try to pick a different hotel (usually a much more
competitive market than the range of options I have in my
neighborhood for "lowest price acceptable service", partially
because I impose fewer requirements).  Now I've gotten to hotels
after getting a "yes" answer and had the same experiences that
Ohta-san obviously has: I ask about Internet and am eventually
pointed to an RJ11 jack or, worse, an RJ45 jack that might be
ISDN and might be no longer hooked up and about which no one can
answer questions about charging.  Or, as happened a month ago, I
find WiFi in the lobby but a beacon connected to... nothing.
Seems the hotel took their wired Ethernet to the rooms out a
month previously, hasn't gotten the 802.11 hooked up to a router
yet, and didn't intend to start figuring what to do with the
rooms until they figured out how much capacity the 802.11 has
and how far it would reach.  

I tend to find these situations annoying, just as I find getting
to a hotel that advertises "Internet in every room" and
discovering that they mean a WebTV clone and nothing else, not
even a spare RJ11 jack.  I complain.  I write letters.  I
collect selections of groveling apologies, especially from
hotels that are members of chains in which I stay fairly often.
But I also get a certain amount of astonishment from folks who
were clearly clueless and don't quite understand why I'm upset.
The I-D was driven partially by a desire to go to them and say
"ok, hotel manager, there are these categories, and they are
pretty generally understood.  Take the list to your supplier,
find out what they are providing you, and then tell the truth
when someone asks.  If you are providing WebTV-clone-only
access, and you tell someone that, and they say 'sorry, I'll
find somewhere else to stay', then you have a basis for thinking
about some business decisions."   

That is the best I know how to do, but I think it would be a
step forward.

And, that said, Ohta-san's note and the above suggests that
there are at least two, maybe three, categories missing from the
I-D because it sort of assumes a "broadband" connection or
better, e.g., 

	* We provide a really nice telephone line, but you are
	on your own for modems, adapters, and ISPs.
	
	* We provide a really nice telephone line that can be
	used with your modem, and an in-house terminal server
	connected to our ISP (that was popular several years
	ago, is anyone still doing it?)
	
	* There is this web-enabled TV set in your room, with
	its own keyboard, but you can't use your own machine
	except via the telephone.

Does the I-D need any of that?  Would anyone like to suggest
language?

> So, let's call all the telephone companies ISPs.

I can think of a lot of things to call telephone companies :-(.
For better or worse, it seems to be the nature of language and
marketing organizations that once-precise terms lose meaning.
Many of us can actually remember when "Decision Support System"
and even "Management Information System" meant something, and
neither one was a "glorified spreadsheet".  It happens.  It is
too bad.  But, if there is any cure, it is getting a bit ahead
of the terminology so that one can say "call yourself whatever
you like, but, if you don't use these service definitions
accurately, someone will probably accuse you of being
deliberately deceptive".  That is pretty close to my hotel
conversations.  Sometimes it will work.  Sometimes and in some
places, the regulators will get tired enough of complaints about
deceived consumers that they will make the definitions
mandatory.  Sometimes it won't.  Life is hard.

But it would be, IMO, stupid of us to say "the IETF can't
legislate this, or make possession of a NAT, or selling a
highly-filtered connection, a crime, so we should do nothing but
whine at regular intervals".

     john

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 11:11:25 +0900

John C Klensin;

With your motivation explained and with your three new categories,
all of which are unrelated to telecommunication providers but
related to hotels, I think I can understand your fundamental
mistake.

That is, your draft should have been titled:

	Terminologies on Telecommunication Service Categories of
	Accomodation Service Providers

Given that your stay is temporary, permanent addresses are of
little value. Moreover, as most, if not all, hotels use NAT,
it is of little value to mention global addresses.

So, in the new draft, you should avoid the word "ISP". Instead,
you can, for example, say ASAP (Application Service Access
Provider).

Mobile operators in Japan does provide access to web services,
though not over IP, that they are WSAP. Or, do you like better
calling them Web Access Service Providers?

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Florian Weimer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:44:16 +0200

> enough for the money. This is that I don't know in advance what

So far, I had no trouble getting the facts beforehand.  If you can't
reach anyone at that ISP for comment, you don't want to become its
customer anyway because nobody will help you in case of errors.

> buying, then I don't have the choice.

The choice exists.  Of course, you need to know how to make that
choice.  Just reading some web pages (particularly those which confirm
your prejudices) won't help you, though.

>   off after 24 hours in order to force them to have

Which one?

>   in Germany.

It isn't.  Just be repeating it over and over again doesn't make it
true.  If you can't find an ISP which uses ZISP or ISPgate to deliver
IPv6, it's your fault.  There are some of them.

>   Some providers simply don't want to provide IPv6, because they say
>   "Internet" is IPv4.

This is certainly a reasonable approach at the moment.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 11:39:03 -0400

> related to hotels, I think I can understand your fundamental

More generally, Internet access is of 4 basic time-base categories:

1) Access at the location(s) you usually are (home, office, dorm, etc) - these
are "traditional" ISPs.  The timeframe for (business) associations here is "weeks to years".

2) Access when you're semi-stationary while not where you usually are (hotels,
extended stays with friends/relatives, and so on).  Timeframe for associations
is "one to several days".  Note *carefully* that this has some corner-case
implications - if I'm visiting my brother in New England, I'm a semi-long-term
(a week or so) transient on his home Ethernet and thence to his cablemodem
provider, while *he* is a long-term user of the *exact same connection*. As a
result, *his* expectations and *mine* regarding the same service may be quite
different (for example, he may be quite OK with the concept that all SMTP gets
redirected to the provider because he uses their mail relay by default anyhow,
but that may be totally unacceptable to me)....

3) Very short term access while stationary long enough to consume 1 beverage -
the kiosk/cafe model.  Associations on the order of 15 minutes to a very small
number of hours.

4) Roaming access while *not* stationary - citywide wifi networks and the like,
where the timescales are seconds to minutes... 

Note that the types of services provided is generally orthogonal to the timescale
of the business model - a provider can (for instance) provide WebTV-style captive
access at all 4 timescales.  As a result, we probably end up with a 2-D matrix...

> it is of little value to mention global addresses.

Note that the fact that I'm there for only several days does *not* imply that
permanent (at least for the duration of the stay) addresses are of little
value. Also, note that there's a distinction between "permanent" and "routable"
in this context.  There's a wide range of things where I don't *care* what my
current IP address is as long as it's routable - in those cases, I can easily
deal with a DHCP-assigned routable address, but not with a NAT'ed address,
whether the NAT'ed address is dynamic or static.  I can be 192.168.10.10
from last year till the next Winter Olympics - that address Simply Will Not
Work for many things.

In particular, the fact that most hotels use NAT is quite likely one of the big
stumbling blocks for commercial deployment of any application protocol that has
trouble playing nice with NAT (See Keith Moore's list - all of those are
basically not doable in your organization if you have frequent road warriors
who might be participating from a hotel room).

> you can, for example, say ASAP (Application Service Access

Providing a common list of such things is the intent of the draft, I believe.

> calling them Web Access Service Providers?

Oh my... A can of worms indeed.  John - it's your call if you want to
expand the scope to include that class of access or not....
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 04:54:35 +0900

Valdis;

> More generally, Internet access is of 4 basic time-base categories:

I think the difference is not on time-base but on who has the control
to choose the telecommunication service.

In John's cases seemingly, Hotels has the control.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Markus Stumpf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:02:29 +0200

> Sue on what grounds?  Who says that Internet service has no limits?

If there are limits they'd have to be in the contract.

> limits, starting with something about network abuse.

Hmmm ... we have no limits and we have no AUP that forbids anything.
We sell Internet access, just like a car company sells cars. The car
company doesn't have a passus "you are not allowed to cross red lights"
because they neither have the possibility nor the legal authority to
enforce such a passus and we don't have "you are not allowed to hack
other computers". However law in Germany gives us the possibility
to terminate such an account at any time, as hacking is not allowed
and if we know about it we have to take appropiate actions to stop
illegal behaviour.

We have DSL accounts for "private use" on dynamic address space
with a disconnect every 24 hours (policy of our "DSL carrier") and
we have DSL accounts for "business use" that can have a static IP
address and that don't have disconnections (most of them on SDSL).

We're currently thinking about a port 25 outgoing block for "private
use" DSL accounts, but this will be a clear passus in the contract
and also be listed in the product description.

> (Never mind 

If you want to buy a car and ask if it has air bags and nobody can
give you a definite answer, would you buy the car if it is important to
you to have an air bag?
If the ISP can't answer the question about improtant product details,
why do you sign a contract with that provider? Because he is cheaper
than others? Now what would most probably be the reason?

> bought an account with limits you failed to clarify.

This is the important part: "you failed to clarify".

> find someone who even understands the question.

Maybe you didn't look hard enough? ;-)

>     is closest to a "DSL Surf Accounts"?

It is probably something like "Web connectivity" or "Client connectivity
only", but I find the terms in the draft *very* fuzzy and overlapping.
And no I haven't yet thought about it long enough to make suggestions ;-)

In general I support all what you said to some extent.

But there are always tradeoffs if you get your DSL access from a "big
player" who may be a bit cheaper vs. access from a smaller ISP that
may be a bit more expensive but may provide a lot more service and
support.

	\Maex

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:57:02 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Markus Stumpf <[email-masked]>

> give you a definite answer, would you buy the car if it is important to

Buging a car with a feature with well defined characteristics is quite
different from buying Internet services which don't even have common
names.  Air bags, at least in the U.S., must do exactly what they do
even if that is known to kill people who are short.  Your "private
use" Internet service is basically whatever you feel like selling.
That you apparently call it "private use" instead of one of the more
common names is yet another symptom of the problem.

> than others? Now what would most probably be the reason?

I'm in the insignificant minority that can ask the right questions
about IP service and recognize when I'm not getting answers, but I can
neither ask good questions about air bags, nor recognize nonsense
answers.  I don't know much about air bags except that they are bombs
in bags, which is as much as most sales people.  Still, I can buy a
car with an air bag and know I'm getting something that might do some
good (unless I'm short or sit too far forward) and meets a standard.
Without the standardization of "air bag," I could not.

We have a classic standardization problem that is affecting
interoperability.  The market has gotten ahead of the IETF and is
buying and selling a many quite different things all called "Internet
service."   It is more the job of the IETF to define standards
including a taxomony in this area than to define yet another MIB.

It is not the job of the IETF to try to stop anyone from selling
services that differ from what we used to get via NSF any more than
it is the job of the IETF to prevent the sales of NAT boxes and PPPoE,
no matter how nasty and evil NAT, PPPoE, and slum IP services are.  It
is right, proper, and necessary that the IETF has NAT and PPPoE
standards.  We should also have standards for your "private use Internet
service" as distinct from the services I bought 20 years ago, even if
you agree with me that "slum IP service sold by virtual slumlords to
fools" is as accurate and more clear than "client only, private address."

> This is the important part: "you failed to clarify".

Unless you are among the insignificant minority who knows the difference
between an ICMP Port-Unreachable and an ICMP Administrative-Prohibited,
you are incapable of clarifying.  Worse, unless you know more than all
available employees at many Internet services providers, you are
incapable of knowing whether you're being told nonsense.

Standards for the various flavors of "Internet service" would solve
those problems for both users and service providers.

> And no I haven't yet thought about it long enough to make suggestions ;-)

What about adding explicit lists of the packets that are (not) filtered,
frequency of DHCP reassignment, DSL PPP disconnections, and whatever?

The draft currently gives the equivalents of "driver's side", "passenger,"
"side impact air bags," for consumers but does not include the technical
stuff equivalent to the rules for air bags.  Something like the "Client
connectivity only" now in the draft is needed by consumers and front
line technical support people, but it is not sufficent for a provider
(or a government) to determine compliance.

Maybe this needs a WG.

> In general I support all what you said to some extent.

In that case it would be nice if you would not write as if you vehimently
opposed the notion of standardizing terms for classes or kinds of
Internet service.  Except for that single sentence, I have the impression
that you agree with the individual from Japan that the whole idea of
the draft is entirely wrong and destructive.

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:39:07 +0200

> names.

But that's just a detail. The real difference is that you can buy a car 
anywhere on the landmass of your choice and then bring it to whereever 
you want to use it on that same landmass. With IP service, you're 
limited to whatever is available in a certain place. Usually the choice 
is between too expensive and/or too slow (dial-up and GPRS and the 
like) and broken (most hotel broadband and wifi hotspots).

> it is the job of the IETF to prevent the sales of NAT boxes and PPPoE,

I disagree. If the IETF were in the position to influence people, it 
should certainly do so. What good is it to standardize protocols that 
can't be deployed because network operators build networks that can't 
support them? Unfortunately, there are usually reasons for implementing 
breakage, and wisdom from the IETF isn't going to remove those reasons, 
so we shouldn't expect miracles.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 13:57:36 -0400

> like) and broken (most hotel broadband and wifi hotspots).

The analogy gets much more interesting if you posit the existence of cars
that run on diesel, or ethanol, or hydrogen fuel cell, or other energy sources
not as widespread as 89-octane gasoline....
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf