Re: [members-discuss] Re: RIPE NCC Position On The ITU IPv6 Group (fwd)

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Mar 1, 2010, at 11:42 PM, Arjan van der Oest wrote:

> CB3ROB scribbled:
>
> > let the riots commence 2.0....
>
> Oh dear oh dear...
>
> > keep in mind, most telcos and ISPs (the founders and members of the 
> > current IANA -> RIRS -> LIRs model resulting in a global internet which
> is 
> > hard to censor) do not agree on this ITU proposal...
>
> I wonder who those ITU members are then? Are those all currently
> non-internet-offering telco's?
The voting members of the ITU are national governments. The telcos
get to speak at some ITU sessions and get to attend most of them,
but, they don't generally get to vote as I understand it.

> > If we allow them to go forward, this WILL result in a "per country" 
> > easy-to-filter internet in a few years when ipv6 is the only serious 
> > protocol left.
>
> /me hands CB3ROB some tinfoil and mumbles : "believers, start your
> FOLDING!"
>
> > we only need to point out how easy it was for the DDR to simply route
> > all phonecalls to "the west" through a room where people monitored 
> > telephone conversations, and this "country specific prefix" is just
> what 
> > the ITU seems to want for the internet.
>
> Not comparing this to the former-DDR or Chinese situation (please refer
> to my tin-foil remark above) a per-country specific prefix is not
> necessarily a bad thing and may even have an upside.
Care to explain what that could possibly be? (I simply don't see an
upside to making it easy to censor the internet by national identity).

> > In order to accomplish that they want to create their own address 
> > registry, for now "secondary" to the ISP/telco run bottom-down RIR
> system 
> > (RIPE,ARIN,APNIC,AFRINIC,APNIC) but ofcourse we can't expect it to
> take 
> > long before repressive governments start to force "the internets" "in 
> > their country" to use only the ITU registry...
>
> Why?
Because such is the nature of repressive governments?

> > now -we- can always move our office to some other country and take our
> tax 
> > money to some other resort, not a biggie, but don't come complaining
> to me 
> > when germany at some point uses this to build their own chinese bigass
>
> > golden firewall with flames coming out of its ass to make it faster.
>
> Sven, I think several less-democratic nations have already proven that
> if they require total control of the internet within the boundaries of
> their country (sic) they can and will implement this anyhow. They don't
> require ITU nor the UN for this. They will just demand Cisco and Google
> to implement it and the corporate chiefs will just answer "How soon?"...
In fact, so far, said countries have had only minimal success with this
approach.  Look at the tunneling out of Iran during the recent events
and the amount of "unauthorized" information which made it out to
the world via the internet.

In general, the current internet regards censorship as damage and
routes around it. Giving repressive regimes the ability to know that
all the addresses they want to allow to communicate are in a defined
prefix would make effective censorship much easier and make
working around that problem much harder.

In spite of this fact, that is not the primary reason to oppose the ITU
proposal. Competing Internet Registry structures where one structure
is not bound by the stratagems of RFC-2050, or, for that matter, any
form of policy other than what each national IR chooses to implement
is a recipe for disaster in address policy. Imagine, for example, what
happens when $NATION decides that spammers are a good source
of revenue and starts selling them rotating address chunks for
a fee. Pretty soon, the IPv6 address space could end up looking
like the island of Nauru.

(http://www.lawanddevelopment.org/docs/nauru.pdf)
> > (considering the fact that governments themselves are not capable of 
> > running anything but a gray-cheese-with-a-dial telephone network
>
> Hm, I was under the impression that ARPANET was a government run
> network...
No, ARPANET was a government sponsored network run by researchers.
The fact that it is a cooperative anarchy rather than a highly structured
centralized management structure pretty much proves that although the
government funded it and pointed in a vague development direction,
they had little to do with the implementation details and even less to
do with the operational details.

> > they need us, we don't need them
>
> If they install legislation that forbids anyone without a license to run
> a telecommunications network of ANY kind, surely you need them, with or
> without ITU and/or RIR's.
And yet so long as a given country has at least one licensed carrier
doing some level of international IP based services it becomes almost
impossible to inflict deeper policy on what use those IP based services
are put to.

OTOH, a wide-spread crackdown of national control over prefix
distribution could make that much worse.

Owen