[Chapter-delegates] net neutrality vs DNS redirection

[Alejandro Pisanty]

Dear Narelle,

to the rational, inquisitive mind nothing must be sacred  or at least 
nothing technical should be exempt of inspection.

However, in this case - DNS redirection - that exercise has been performed 
extensively in recent years, as a result of the Verisign wildcard 
"exercise".

Steve Crocker, whom you probably know as the guy who defined the RFCs and 
has contributed much to the IETF over maybe 35 years, an ICANN Board 
liaison for the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, and a large 
chain of other merit badges, is telling us here the condensate of the 
conclusions of that discussion: don't mess with the DNS.

I lived through the Verisign wildcard spat as an ICANN Board member, so 
was close to it and the lessons learned, and saw some of the ugly things 
that happen, even for the Web alone, and definitely side with this 
conclusion.

While there is much to be said about consumer choice etc., in this case it 
may be a too slow tool, and be faced with insufficient choice (e.g., two 
ISPs who only differ in how they do DNS redirection to their own benefit, 
not in one doing it and the other sticking to standards and best practice.

Yours,

Alejandro Pisanty


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      Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
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On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Narelle Clark wrote:

> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:27:54 +1000
> From: Narelle Clark <Narelle.Clark at optus.com.au>
> To: 'Steve Crocker' <steve at shinkuro.com>
> Cc: 'Chapter Delegates isoc' <chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org>
> Subject: Re: [Chapter-delegates] net neutrality vs DNS redirection
> 
>
>> 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
>
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