Subject: Re: [Asrg] New Version Notification for draft-irtf-asrg-dnsbl-07

From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:14:30 -0700 (PDT)

It seems to me from the thread, that any legal advice, policy (beside BCP) should be avoided in a RFC. Let others make their own judgment. After all this RFC is for technical people that implement or use DNSBL 

But it seems important to me to highlight, this type of DNS does not have any hierarchy. 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Feenberg" <[email-masked]> 
To: "Anti-Spam Research Group - IRTF" <[email-masked]> 
Sent: Wednesday, 15 October, 2008 5:03:02 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
Subject: Re: [Asrg] New Version Notification for draft-irtf-asrg-dnsbl-07 

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, Ian Eiloart wrote: 

> 
> 
> --On 14 October 2008 13:31:06 -0400 der Mouse <[email-masked]> 
> wrote: 
> 
>>>> Because of the importance of the Internet in general, I would 
>>>> suggest that RFCs include a legal considerations section for aiding 
>>>> lawmakers, where relevant. 
>>> I really don't think it's a good idea for us technonerds to be giving 
>>> legal advice. Just think of the technical advice that lawyers would 
>>> give us, and then ask yourself why ours would be any better. 
>> 
>> Besides, which jurisdiction(s) would the legal considerations be for? 
>> 
> 
> I guess the point would be to direct future legislation, rather than to try 
> to reflect current legislation. But, I don't think that RFCs are a great 
> place to lobby for legislation. 
> 

In many jusrisdictions, and in many court cases, the judge will need to 
establish the "customs of the trade". RFCs can be introduced to help 
inform the judge of these customs. So an RFC can have legal significance, 
even if it isn't legal advice, or law itself. We wouldn't want the RFC to 
contain material that would mislead a judge in such a situation. 

It isn't a matter of writing law that is valid for every country on earth, 
but of correctly damping the expectations of spammers for spam delivery, 
so that judges will understand that the spammer has "no reasonable 
expectation" of delivery. Of course statutes can override custom, but that 
is not the business of the RFC. 

Daniel Feenberg 

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From: "David Nicol" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:36:11 -0500

> But it seems important to me to highlight, this type of DNS does not have

That's an implementation detail orthogonal to the semantics.

Given the sample records for

99.2.0.192.bad.example.com

an implementor could distribute their load by setting up authoritative
servers at any break, perhaps there is enough traffic requesting
records for *.192.bad.example.com to justify delegating that to its
own hardware.

So there's nothing stopping an implementor of a dns*l from using a
hierarchy instead of a big server, if that makes sense.

Or did you mean something else by "does not have any hierarchy?"

-- 
"Every man a god, that is if you can qualify.  You can't be the god of
anything unless you can do it" -- William S. Burroughs
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From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:03:32 -0700 (PDT)

Well, my meaning is that these are islands. There is no root.

---

From: "David Nicol" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:05:25 -0500

to paraphrase Mr. Levine, establishing a organized hierarchy of DNS*Ls
is not on anyone's radar.

It's an interesting idea, but who or what would be the root?  How
would they be organized?  Its easy to imagine the process starting by
partnerships between complementary lists, and hard to imagine the
massive infrastructure investment required to establish a semantic
organization of dnslists by fiat.

Imagining a standardization under, for instance, .lists.arpa is
certainly easy to do, and would give a level of legitimacy to those
lists able to achieve that brand. (presumably there would be service
level and governance requirements)