On Mar 12, 2004, at 9:36 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
NB> some of us want to discuss it in terms of property rights, and others
NB> of us want to discuss it in terms of human rights.
Unfortunately, the IETF mailing list is not a very good venue for either
topic, because most of the folks on the IETF mailing list have no
qualifications or special insight into these difficult issues.
This is exactly right -- we have people arguing from two different paradigms, both fundamentally orthogonal to the expertise of the IETF. What this suggests to me is that until the larger society -- i.e. the courts and international institutions -- reach a determination of the "right" paradigm for dealing with spam, the IETF is going to spin its wheels on these issues. If someone could tell us definitively "this is a question of property rights" or "this is a question of human rights" or whatever, the IETF as a community would be well qualified to do the engineering implied by that conclusion. Until then, it's probably an unresolvable issue for a community as open and democratic as the IETF.
But most of us recognize that spam needs to be attacked on several fronts. We can and should focus IETF efforts on getting as many not-overly-controversial approaches to spam control to work together, and declare "out of IETF scope" those efforts that are the subject of ongoing paradigmatic debates at the political layer. That doesn't mean that people like Paul and Vernon can't work on property-based approaches, nor that others of us can't work on approaches that consider the universal ability to communicate as a higher-priority requirement, but merely that the IETF as a body should probably avoid both of those families of solutions, pending a broader societal consensus. (When Paul started quoting John Locke, I was very tempted -- not being a big Locke fan, to say the least -- to start quoting several other philosophers, and that's when the the lightbulb finally went off in my head, a realization that this was not an IETF discussion anymore. Paul and I can debate philosophy on our own time, and I look forward to it.) Perhaps the rule of thumb is that if the discussion of a topic repeatedly deteriorates into arguments about the philosophical underpinnings of civil society, it's not a suitable topic for the IETF?
The question that remains for IETF is this one: what can we -- including people like Paul and me who are mutually friendly and respectful, but philosophically from opposite ends of the Earth -- do together *constructively* about spam?
For my part, I think we as an engineering community can make a lot of progress on the less-philosophically-controversial stuff that won't solve the whole spam problem, but that support both of our approaches -- not only the DNS-based approaches being discussed in ietf-mxcomp, but also, I suspect, a whole lot of other things (e.g., standardized headers to let challenge/response work better with mailing lists, protocols for sharing data for collaborative spam filtering, standardized SMTP extensions for cryptographic challenge/response (which this morning's BBC broadcast described as a new Microsoft invention!), and perhaps even improved tracing/accountability tools for law enforcement.)
Anyway, in closing I apologize to the entire IETF community for taking so long to realize that some of my technical arguments have been founded upon basic philosophical assumptions which are not universally shared. Perhaps if we can all try to make this separation we will begin to make more progress. -- Nathaniel
