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RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users


HTTP
QUIC Working Groups

the Internet Architecture Board
Twitter
IAB
IETF
DNS
UsersHowever
HTTPS
Why?If the IETF’s
RFC7258 Pervasive Monitoring
the UK Parliament
Baroness Thornton
ProcessHowever
The UK Government


Charles Eames
Mark Nottingham
RFC8890
Tim Berners-Lee
RFC6973
RFC8752
Martin Thomson
Eric Rescorla

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Europe

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TCP
China
America
UK

No matching tags

Positivity     34.00%   
   Negativity   66.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2020/08/28/for_the_users
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Summary

Formed in the 1980s by the engineers who created several of the Internet’s core technologies, it is the primary venue for documenting the technical design of the Internet, and has overseen development of protocols like TCP, IP, DNS and HTTP.Companies, governments and other organisations don’t officially participate in the IETF; people only represent themselves. So, over the years, the IETF community has made progress in documenting explicit principles that can guide decision-making.For example, RFC7258 Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack established IETF consensus that it’s bad for the Internet to allow widespread, covert monitoring, and that therefore the IETF would design its protocols to mitigate this risk —a technical argument with both political motivation and ramifications.Likewise, RFC6973 documents Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols, and RFC8752 reports on an IAB workshop that explored the power dynamics between news publishers and large online platforms.Or, consider the end-to-end principle, which states that features for applications should reside in the end nodes (for example, your computer or phone) rather than in the network.The IETF community will (I hope) continue to document and explore such principles, informed by shared values. RFC8890 makes a small contribution to this, by asking the IETF community to favour end users of the Internet — in other words, actual people — over other stakeholders that ask for their needs to be met, when there’s a conflict.If the IETF didn’t have any underlying principles, it would just focus on technology. Other parties like equipment and software vendors, end users, platform and network operators and ultimately governments have a lot more say in what actually happens on the Internet from day to day.What the IETF has is a proven ability to design protocols that work at scale, the ability to steer a proposal to align with its principles, and a reputation that gives its documents a certain amount of gravitas. It doesn’t work the other way around; if an IETF standard doesn’t catch on with implementers and users, it gets ignored (and many have).The Internet is for End Users argues that this soft power should be explicitly acknowledged, so that participants are more conscious of the real-world ramifications of their decisions.DNS over HTTPS is an interesting case study. It got the IETF mentioned in the UK Parliament by Baroness Thornton, a child safety advocate concerned about DoH’s use to bypass DNS-based controls mandated by UK law:’[T]here is a fundamental and very concerning lack of accountability when obscure technical groups, peopled largely by the employees of the big internet companies, take decisions that have major public policy implications with enormous consequences for all of us…’However, DoH was designed, contributed and ultimately deployed by participants from Web browsers, not the IETF, who cannot stop vendors from deploying a protocol it doesn’t approve of (as is often said, ‘there are no standards police.’). The Internet is for End Users argues that such consultation is important, to assure that the people writing and reviewing the protocols understand how they will be used, and how they will impact users.In the case of DoH, better communication between the technical community (not just big tech companies) and policymakers would clarified that relying on DNS to impose filtering was a bad assumption, in light of the principles underlying the design of the Internet.“From its inception, the Internet has been, and is expected to remain, an evolving system whose participants regularly factor new requirements and technology into its design and implementation. Besides the internal rules which assure that the standards process runs in a way that’s accountable to the technical community, ultimately the IETF is accountable to the Internet; if it strays too far from what vendors, networks, users, and governments want to do, it will lose relevance. Without good communication, policymakers are prone to making rules that doesn’t work with the technology, and technologists are prone to creating technology naïve to its policy implications.So at its heart, The Internet is for End Users is a call for IETF participants to stop pretending that they can ignore the non-technical consequences of their decisions, a call for broader consultation when making them, and one for continued focus on the end user.

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