[governance] What is RPKI and why should you care about it?

Sun Sep 12 13:32:36 EDT 2010

An observation on the overall framing of Milton Mueller's approach
follows. I don't claim the following reflects his intent, but it is
one of the main meanings some people will take away from the way it
is specifically worded.:

 LAW will always be "behind" technology in all societies that profess
freedom of innovation  in the technological sector.  Consequently, if
someone has a right or freedom to go into business, as with all rights
the thing is not truly a right unless it may be freely exercised, with
"punishment" for abuse occurring (if any) later on after the right's
been exercised...

As a practical matter, law can not possibly be  "ahead of the curve"
and therefore anticipate very specific technological developments --
at least not when freedom of innovation exists. Law can only have
principles or general laws that then have to be applied to new
technological contexts.  That's the almost everyday business of law
and lawyers.

(My "issue" here is the context or subtext  I felt was underlying the
opening paragraph, which is consistent with much I hear, that law is
somehow "behind".  Yes, we can do better and Milton Mueller's efforts
can be part of that but there's no reason to expect or even to
necessarily desire that law completely catches up or somehow gets
ahead of technology, so it should not be faulted for doing so.  Such a
notion of "fault" falsely reinforces in some readers' minds that
law/governance is always defective or something like that, and
therefore promotes laissez faire approaches to internet regulation
WITHOUT the debate and discussion that is the only way to legitimize
such approaches.)

---Paul Lehto, J.D.

On 9/12/10, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> These are good observations, Karl.
> It is good that you see the relevance of these issues. The IGF itself has
> had a hard time doing that. Note that our workshop is not listed as a feeder
> into the critical internet resources main session. This is not because
> routing-addressing are not vital to CIR, but because no one in the MAG was
> far sighted enough to view these issues as critical. As usual, they will
> wait until something blows up in their face and it's too late to do anything
> about it before they officially recognize routing as a major issue.
>
> The term "system" does not necessarily imply the singularity you are
> asserting. A system is nothing more than a set of interrelated components;
> one can speak of the "economic system," the "price system" and so on without
> implying any centralization of authority.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Karl Auerbach [mailto:karl at cavebear.com]
>> Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 8:28 PM
>> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
>> Subject: Re: [governance] What is RPKI and why should you care about it?
>>
>> On 09/11/2010 06:14 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>>
>> > That's the rationale behind our Workshop on "Routing and Resource
>> > Certification." It's about the resource public key infrastructure
>> (RPKI)
>> > being proposed and implemented to secure the Internet's routing and
>> > addressing system.
>>
>> You are right in saying that those are significant matters - matters
>> that could give, in the extreme case, the power to turn-off certain
>> parts of the net (or rather, turn off information needed for packets
>> flowing *to* certain parts of the net to find their way.)
>>
>> You say the Internet's routing and addressing system" - I note the use
>> of the singular form.  In practice there is not a single routing system
>> - there are fairly standard protocols (most particularly BGP) but those
>> are carrier-to-carrier rather than a unified mesh.  And there is an
>> overlay of unilateral, bi-lateral, and multi-lateral agreements (human
>> agreements turned into router configuration settings) that overlay the
>> information that is moved by things like BGP.  And, of course, we are
>> seeing a trend in which large content providers (like Google) have their
>> own private networks that they hook directly to large edge network
>> providers (such as Comcast) thus bypassing intermediate carriers.
>>
>> Like fake-source email there is a problem with false or improper
>> announcements of routing information.  (I'm dealing with that kind of
>> problem myself - someone to whom I lent some address space some years
>> ago is refusing to stop advertising his use of the space - that suggests
>> that the issue goes deeper than "false identity" and can reach to
>> whether the entity announcing routing information is empowered to do
>> so.)
>>
>> Regarding the other use of the singular form to "addressing" - with the
>> increasing use of network address translation (there is even demand for
>> it in IPv6) it is becoming increasingly hard to say which is the dog and
>> which is the tail - is the "public" IP address space becoming merely a
>> means to connect "private" address spaces?
>>
>> I ask that latter question with an intent to suggest that we might see a
>> future internet that is more "lumpy" than we see today.  The end-to-end
>> principle may fade and be replaced by an internet in which rather than
>> packets flowing unvexed end-to-end we see certain applications being
>> bridged across boundaries that vanilla IP packets can not leap.  In
>> other words the internet may evolve from being a seamless IP packet
>> transport and become something more like the mobile telephone networks -
>> certain basic features will work across providers but only because the
>> providers build explicit (although often hidden from user view) bridges
>> among themselves.
>>
>> I have been slowly writing a note on how our perception of the internet
>> is changing.  We who have been on the net for a long time tend to view
>> it as a means of moving IP packets from one IP address to another.  Yet
>> most people who have come to the net since, say 1995, tend to view the
>> net not as a means of packet exchange but, rather, as a platform for
>> certain applications.
>>
>> That shift of perception, from packet-mesh to application-platform,
>> radically changes our view of what is important to preserve on the net
>> and also changes the points where pressure may be applied for purposes
>> of imposing regulation/governance or creating anti-competitive regimes.
>>
>> 	--karl--
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-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-2334
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