Subject: [DNSOP] Choice in draft-livingood-dns-redirect

From: Alissa Cooper <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:02:29 +0200

Reflecting on something Rob said in yesterday's meeting, I think the  
way that choice is dealt with in draft-livingood-dns-redirect could be  
improved. Whether subscribers are opting in to DNS redirection or not  
obviously has a huge impact on how the practice is judged.

In the current draft, the four flavors of redirect (web error,  
malicious sites, legally mandated and content-based) are articulated  
as somewhat comparable alternatives. But the last two are actually  
qualitatively different from a choice perspective: it seems highly  
unlikely that legally mandated redirection would be operated with any  
choice mechanism at all, and based on the description of content-based  
redirection, it seems to be describing a purely opt-in service. At the  
same time, the requests that are subject to redirection in both of  
those cases seem to be largely unbounded. A legal mandate could apply  
to any URL (assuming legal authorities act arbitrarily), and a user  
could choose to avoid any content. This is, by definition, not true  
for the other two redirect flavors.

I understand the desire to avoid discussing opt-in/opt-out mechanisms  
in much detail, but it seems like the broader notion that something  
users choose for themselves is less objectionable that something that  
is chosen on their behalf should be stated up front. This would also  
help distinguish legally mandated and content-based redirection (where  
the type of choice offered is more or less implicit) from web error  
and malicious sites (where the ISP has a decision to make about how  
choice will be offered).

Alissa

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From: "Livingood, Jason" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:25:39 -0400

Good points, all.  One of the things I noted from the WG meeting was the
desire to separate the different types of redirect into distinct I-Ds, which
I plan to do.  That should help avoid conflating what are very different
sort of redirect in practice.

Thanks
Jason