At 11:04 AM -0800 11/17/98, J.D. Falk wrote:
On 11/16/98, Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com> wrote:
That does not mean no oversight. It merely means finding non-governmental methods of achieving the oversight. I suggest, for example, that a competent and careful effort of the type Sean is suggesting would go a long, long way towards helping things, by providing public and clear explanations of problems. Yes, it is possible that some ISPs would choose to ignore the public disclosure, but let's worry about that problem after give simple, public discourse a try. Such an approach has a good track on the Internet.
Furthermore...I'd be willing to bet that if the FCC or whoever got a lot of complaints, they'd form an oversight committee.
Why not just form one ourselves, making sure that it's answerable to the needs of the Internet community?
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Let me begin this by saying emphatically that I am _NOT_ proposing to put any Internet operational procedures under the Official Standards Infrastructure. (When I did OSI at COS, I always asked my boss that I understood what the OSI infrastructure is, but I was unclear about the superstructure. Ian said that he would be as good an example as any.) In non-IP networking, there are certainly things that go beyond national boundaries and are operationally critical. RF spectrum allocations, for example, are a different matter than ISO or ITU protocol development. True, the UN has no internal means of sending a missile at a transmitter on an illegal frequency. To me, there's a reasonably close analogy between the Internet routing space and the global RF spectrum. There are collisions if people use the same frequency/prefix (I am _not_ going to get into line-of-sight issues). Is someone familiar enough with the procedures for dealing with inappropriate spectrum use to see if there might be any parallels for Internet operations? Howard, who remembers a presentation at AFCEA where an Israeli Air Force general was asked about the best electronic countermeasures they had found to use against Soviet-bloc radar. He suggested that very few jammers, range gate stealers, etc., really compared to a laser-guided bomb down the feed horn of the antenna.