[ih] A paper

[Patrik Fältström]

Hi,

A good paper, but I miss your evaluation of the discussion about how to implement privacy and differentiated access that went on 1994-2000, specifically related to whois.

Technically one could express it in a simplified way like this. You have information describing something at one location, and you have whoever want to get information about that something at some other location. These two locations are on two different locations on the Internet.

To be able to get that information, the information must first be created, and then moved from the origin to whoever asks (or queries) for it.

This can be done in two different ways. Either you move the data towards the party that queries for the information before it is queried for. Or to put it differently, you centralised the storage. Or you let the data stay as close to (or even stay at) the location where it is created, and instead send the query to the origin of the data when the query is issued.

The main reason for keeping data close to the origin was viewed as a need for non-centralisation, and that would also minimise the requirement to harmonise the data, and ultimately have the ability for whoever created the data that describes that something it described to have multiple descriptions and respond differently depending on who is sending the query.

This is a very extreme differentiated or tiered access that later was expressed as "just" tiered access in the protocols developed in IETF from 2000 and onwards. Still not deployed in large scale for reasons described in the paper.

You can for example look at RFC 1913, RFC 1834 and RFC 1835 for one example (Whois++) with centroids that did indeed lack many features required for the whois service, BUT, it did include a robust query routing mechanism for the queries. A routing of the queries that is required for the information to stay where it is created, which in turn enables the origination to manage differentiated access to the data.

And yes, I personally still think query routing for information is something we need to solve many issues related to not only privacy but also human rights. Increase the ability for whoever created information to decide what is responded to depending on who is asking.

I would like people like you and others that work with these issues start evaluating also these issues, how much (and far) is the information moved from the origin towards the querying party? This can also be viewed as the core of the discussion between search engines and news agencies (see court decisions in France for example). When is query routing (i.e. indexing and referrals) taking place and when is information moved from the origination? What is a citation and what is copying of information? Who is in control, and how can control be implemented?

   Patrik

On 16 Jul 2021, at 18:16, farzaneh badii via Internet-history wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Filder and I have published a paper recently about Internet protocols and human rights but had a historical look at WHOIS, BGP/EGP and DNS. We greatly enjoyed the informative conversation about BGP and EGP on this list and helped us a lot with providing a more complete background.
>
> Here is the link to the paper:
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.11.2021.0376?refreqid=excelsior%3A5f6e0042f4bc042a36aa87e2a4d0107c#metadata_info_tab_contents
>
> <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.11.2021.0376?refreqid=excelsior%3A5f6e0042f4bc042a36aa87e2a4d0107c#metadata_info_tab_contents>
>
>
> Farzaneh
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
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