On Mar 22, 2005, at 8:13 AM, Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine wrote:
Could someone find out what the actual mandated requirements are? At one point it sounded a lot like just putting PICs lables on published URLs.
Taking the assumption that we have all decided that Utah has asked us to do something that cannot definitively be done, it seems to me that the folks who offer ISP services in Utah need to decide what in fact can be done. I am told (not my expertise) that there are labels that can be put on web pages to prevent search engines from searching them, and that a certain class of pornographer actually uses such. Keeping them out of the search engines is a good thing. That said, not all such do, so one is forced to have a plan B. BTW, HTML PICS don't especially help with virus-bot-originated spam. It seems to me that a simple approach would be to provide a second DNS service in parallel with the first, and advise Utah that if it would be so kind as to inform us of the DNS names of the spam services that they want treated specially, those names will be put into the new DNS service as "the address of this system is 127.0.0.1". Customers can now decide which kind of DNS service they want. Alternatively, and better perhaps for dealing with the email issues, one could put two VRFs on every router - one that has full routes and one that has a number of null routes. If the State of Utah would be so kind as to specify the list of prefixes to be null-routed... The key thing here is to provide a service that in fact works for some definition of that term, and tell Utah that unfunded mandates don't especially help. They have the power to pass any law they want, but in context they have an obligation to the SPs affected to provide an objective way to determine whether the SP is in compliance, and by extension, to provide a reasonable definition of and way to implement the service.