On 2/2/12 12:32 PM, Ray Soucy wrote:
So, to pose the obvious question: Should there be [a law against prefix hijacking]?
So far the track record of the US government trying to make laws regarding technology and the Internet has been less than stellar. ...
While I agree with Ray's points, I want to point out that "new law" to address (obvious pun) disruptive announcements may not be necessary -- at least, I blew off the better part of a day writing to Peter Dengate Thrush and Rod Beckstrom that arbitrary bad acts in the public addressing system were the proper concern of the entity tasked with the technical coordination of unique endpoint identifiers. I didn't expect much from the recipients -- I've known Peter too long and never could be bothered to share Rod's twinkle, but while one prefix announcement may harm one set of downstreams, rapid sustained announcement and withdrawal will harm the DFZ, a much larger kettle of digital fish. One could claim that absent convergence limiting effect on the DFZ no prefix bogosity has general adverse effect (but some prefixes are more interesting than others, so that isn't a policy without nuances), and enjoy watching the state actors and non-state actors and ordinary venal idiots and very ordinary fatfingered idiots* prepend/announce/withdraw with gleeful abandon, or one could assert that autonomous reallocations of limited resources has general adverse effect in addition to the local effect on downstreams, and associate coordinated corrective reallocations with autonomous reallocations. That's "pulling the plug" on retarded dictators, embezzlers, and the latent mil-wits who view the DNS and BGP infrastructures as legitimate military targets. I don't expect progress overnight, in fact I wrote the former Chair and current CEO of that "entity tasked with the technical coordination of unique endpoint identifiers" with no expectations at all (knowledge, supra), but policy response (including errors, see PIPA, SOPA, et seq.) to bad acts in one set of identifiers can be extended to policy response (including errors, resolvers have no monopoly on errors) on the other set of identifiers. So, new law? I don't think its necessary. YMMV, Eric