Re: net.terrorism

["Timothy J. Salo" <salo () saloits com>]

> Subject: Re: net.terrorism 
> Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 04:37:37 -0800
> From: Paul A Vixie <vixie () mfnx net>
>       [...]
> why are we discussing this on nanog?

Well, it sounds like an operational issue.

As described in the original post, a group is disrupting Internet
connectivity to some destinations to achieve certain policy objectives.
This has a number of adverse implications.

o       Policy-based "disconnectivity", like any other source of 
        connectivity problems, makes the Internet appear less reliable
        and less predictable to the end user.  Only a relatively
        sophisticated end user can differentiate broken connectivity
        caused by policies from other sources of connectivity problems.
        Adding yet another cause of difficult-to-diagnose connectivity
        problems hardly seems like a good thing.

o       Whatever the official marketing literature may say, the
        effectiveness of routing-based disconnectivity is generally
        based to a large extent on inflicting pain on third parties.
        That is, if the policy-based disconnectivity causes enough
        pain to enough people, then the originating network or ISP will
        have an incentive ("be forced") to remove the activity that violates
        the policy.  This basic strategy hardly seems like a good thing.

o       Policy-based disconnectivity techniques would appear to set a bad
        precedent.  That is, this activity tends to legitimize the use
        by ISPs of black-hole routing to enforce various acceptable use
        policies.  To the extent that the network community endorses
        black-hole routing as an acceptable tool for enforcing anti-spam
        policies, the technique is more likely to be applied in the
        enforcement of other policies.  For example, French courts could
        conceivably decree a policy-based disconnectivity solution to
        protect users in France from auction sites selling Nazi memorabilia
        (i.e., Yahoo).  (After all, if the technique is acceptable for
        relatively minor social ills like spam, then surely it is
        acceptable to use it for more significant social problems). German
        courts could conceivably require German ISPs to black-hole foreign
        "hate" sites.

        (By the way, I believe that a number of prominent organizations
        have taken stands against the filtering based on content of certain
        foreign sites by some totalitarian countries.  I don't think these
        organizations are are saying that it is wrong to filter based on
        political content, but OK to filter on, for example, less-political
        content such as spam. )

        I believe that legitimizing the use of "disconnectivity" techniques
        (whether they are routing-based or filter-based and whether they
        are "voluntary" [voluntary to whom?] or mandatory) to further
        policy objectives is a really bad thing.

It is not altogether obvious to me that the cure is not worse than the
disease in this case.

-tjs