[Chapter-delegates] net neutrality vs DNS redirection

[Narelle Clark]

> From: Steve Crocker [mailto:steve at shinkuro.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 22 July 2008 11:01 AM
>
> At the DNS level, there's no way to tell whether the intended
> purpose of the DNS query is for browsing versus some other
> purpose, e.g. email, telnet, etc.  Moreover, "not found" is
> sometimes an important and expected answer.

These are excellent points.

The latter certainly the case for ISP customers, but for consumers? How so?

I haven't looked into the response strings from these sorts of advertising systems - are they actually in contravention of the standards? Do they break a response for an email program making a POP request? I doubt it. I rather suspect the same response will be given by the mail program concerned. Same with telnet. Of course, the million other unpredicted new, yet to be invented, applications may do something else again!

An examination of traffic will tell us also how much impact this type of thing would have: currently on most networks raw, unshaped, aggregated consumer Internet is about 50% web traffic. Telnet is down around the 5% mark at most...

Do we really think DNS is sacred in this way? Ie that nothing should divert a 'not found' response to anything else?

What if consumers actually appreciate that it might keep $2/mo off their bills for Internet services?

>  The DNS protocol
> is used as a building block for lots of things, and it's
> expected to work as advertised. Substituting something else
> for "not existent" may seem innocuous, but it's not always
> the case.

I don't think this first response stands the test of scrutiny. Please give some examples. [I see the next message has the spam one as a good example, agreed, this is good.]


> Who gets to decide whether the response is helpful?

Ultimately, I would hope the customers and users do.

Regards


Narelle
ISOC-AU