Subject: Re: [Asrg] Could/Should/Must law require mechanism?

From: "Jeffrey Race" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 20:11:32 +0700

On Mon, 19 May 2003 17:01:32 -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
>From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
>>Given the tremendous backlash against spam that we've seen lately, I
>>wouldn't be surprised if we began to see proposals requiring that
>>specific mechanisms be used to combat it. Just as new laws restricting
>>civil liberties have been "collateral damage" of the anti-terrorism
>>effort, new laws reducing the voluntary nature of Internet standards may
>>be "collateral damage" of the anti-spam effort.
>>Another possibility would be that as the spam problem matures (and,
>assuming no silver bullet) what we're likely to see are lawsuits based
>on what the courts will accept as unreasonable negligence causing
>damage to another party.
>>I think a climate with that as a factor would motivate changes in
>minimal standards pretty quickly.

In adjudicating the equities involved where no law dictates, the courts
pay close attention to the practices and standards governing the
activities involved.  For this reason it is essential that the Internet
community establish clear expectations regarding the acts to be performed
by, and against, spam enablers.   I have attempted to draft some ideas
at

  <http://www.camblab.com/misc/univ_std.txt>

   and the thinking which led to the above 

 <http://www.camblab.com/nugget/spam_03.pdf>

Comments welcome.

Jeffrey Race

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 22:45:00 -0400

The term "pollution" is distracting. 

This entire passage is wrong.

> The Internet's design and management were predicated on voluntary 
> cooperation, self-imposed good behavior, and the non-profit 
> motivational structure of custodians of Internet Resources (IR) 
> extant at its inception.

This entire section is wrong.

> 2.4 IP Address and Domain Name Registrars

This mini-section is wrong.

> 2.5 Anonymity

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From: Daniel Feenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 07:53:32 -0400 (EDT)

>  <http://www.camblab.com/nugget/spam_03.pdf>

I agree with the requirement outlined in the document, but is all the
editorializing and justification appropriate for such a document?
In particular, the blanket condemnation of for-profit enterprise is
certain to signal to any judge that the document could not possibly
represent common industry practice, and is therefore not very relevant to 
his decision. That at least should be removed.

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From: "Tom Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 12:17:07 +0100

> The term "pollution" is distracting.

I don't agree.  It is precise - spam IS pollution.  And the historical
analogy is accurate.

> > motivational structure of custodians of Internet Resources (IR)

Not entirely - the "vluntary cooperation" part is correct.  I agree that the
rest is wrong. For example "non-profit motivational structure" is, to see
the least, an odd description of the average defence contractor.

> > 2.4 IP Address and Domain Name Registrars

One would expect many members of this list to think it wrong (officers of
ISPs and/or Registrars) because it points the finger clearly at them.
Nevertheless, I believe that far from being entirely wrong it is (perhaps
not quite entirely but certainly mostly) right.

> This mini-section is wrong.

Probably wrong, since formally teh ICANN terms for registrars preclude
anonymity.  I thinkl the problem here is that there's a need to distinguish
between

(i) anonymity (in some form) of the registrant of a domain: currently this
is not allowed in theory, but there is a need for well defined exceptions
and outside those exceptions the rules need to be enforced at least in
response to complaints, and

(ii) anonimity of ISP customers, where some of the rules are determined
effectively by backbone providers, and vary from provider to provider, and
ISPs have some flexibility in how they interpret these rules and pass them
on down to their users, so that at the bottom level there is no coherence at
all. But best current practics is surely to be able to identify clients.

Tom

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 07:45:05 -0400

> I don't agree.  It is precise - spam IS pollution.  And the historical

Consider where the claim which cites some hypothetical ASRG work product,
not this one, is evaluated. Is it an institution which draws elements of
administrative law, or leading cases from the EPA or from the FCC, to use
one jurisdiction as an example?

Is "analogy" useful to the expert (ASRG work-product consumer, "this").

Personally, I think interpretation is a problem for the practitioner to
solve, when the circumstances require interpretation at all.

Personally, I don't see any value in abandoning the familiar communications
terms of signal-to-noise, etc.

> the "vluntary cooperation" part is correct.

See rfc954, note the DCA mandates for TAC and home directory access to that
net. There were others.

In any event, the text is its author's.

Eric

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From: "Tom Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 13:11:30 +0100

> See rfc954, note the DCA mandates for TAC and home directory access to
that

The relevant (well, irrelevant actually, see below) paragraph in rfc954
reads

   DCA requests that each individual with a directory on an ARPANET or
   MILNET host, who is capable of passing traffic across the DoD
   Internet, be registered in the NIC WHOIS Database.  MILNET TAC users
   must be registered in the database.

That looks to me like DCA requesting voluntary cooperation from users on
ARPANET. It doesn't even ask for registration from users on other networks
involved in the internet (was NFSnet in the game by October 1985, for
example?). Telling the people they actually controlled (MILNET TAC users)
that they must register isn't part of the cooperation to form the internet,
it's just keeping their own house in order (no doubt each participant had
its own rules for its own people). How many internet users had a home
directory on TAC?  Pretty few, I think. The civilian research institutes,
universities, and defense contractors might be on ARPANET at that date, but
generally not on MILNET TAC.

Anyway, rfc954 is irrelevant to the point under discussion (whether the
internet was originally formed through voluntary cooperation) since it
post-dates the original formation of the internet by a good long time.  You
might want to look at rfc812 instead (dates from some three and a half years
earlier) where there is only a request - no mandate, not even for TAC users.

Tom

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 08:40:43 -0400

> You might want to look at rfc812

I knew Ken, and I knew the circumstances that caused the DCA mandates
to show up in 954. I worked one floor above the NIC, at the time.
Thanks for the suggestion however.
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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 08:54:32 -0400

> Anyway, rfc954 is irrelevant ...

The issues of bulk-, and :42-access to whois data are balloted in the
membership body of registrars for the COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO/NAME set
of top-level domains.
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