On Mar 26, 2013, at 10:51 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
The problem here is, of course, one of externalities and the Common Good, hard sales to make in a business environment.
"Common Good" situations are readily dealt with, but generally not on a voluntary basis. You establish how the resource is to be managed, and then you put in place mechanisms to deal with enforcement. The problem is that en-force-ment contains "force", which is something that we really don't want anyone (or set of anyones) using except "governments" (which in our social constructs are the only ones supposed to be telling one party under penalty of force not to do something otherwise in its best interest.) The problem, of course, with asking governments for help is that the output often does not resemble anything related to the original problem statement and can make the situation worse... If you setup an economic system where folks do the right thing because it is in their own interest, that's one option that doesn't involve government, but we know that is hard to do on technical grounds alone... A group of commercial entities that work together to setup a system which strongly encourages others to follow particular practices does indeed need to worry about Matt Petach's list of statutes, and exercise extreme care in its processes less the result be more about some form of market control and less about common good management. Net result is that management of a common good without some form of government involvement quickly gets quite challenging. If we had truly global operational best practices for the Internet (ones that went through a fairly well-defined policy development process which included multiple operator forums from around the globe) then you might have a solid chance of producing output which avoided the various anti- competitive aspects, and yet were a reasonable basis for governments to then step up and indicate should be required for ISPs in their operations. It wouldn't take very many governments asking "How do I reduce SPAM and DDoS attacks?" and hearing back "Please require ISPs to adhere to this Best Common Operating Practice Foo-01" before it became common practice. FYI, /John