[governance] "Oversight"

[Norbert Bollow]

Hi Andrea and all

Andrea Glorioso <andrea at digitalpolicy.it> wrote:
> On Thursday, June 7, 2012, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > Indeed. Well the level of interest is at least high enough that not
> > long ago, an official of the European Commission asked on this list
> > (if I understood him right) about whether it would be possible to
> > decentralize the root signing function across several countries. To
> > that I replied that yes, it would be possible in principle, but it
> > would require modification of DNSSEC. John pointed out that the
> > required engineering work could be difficult in view of potential
> > problems related to datagram size.
> 
> I believe you are referring to me (I don't think there are so many other
> officials of the European Commission writing on this list :)

Yes I was, although there are two inaccuracies in how I referred to
conversation partners in the above quoted paragraph. I would like to
hereby apologize for those inaccuracies and correct them.

The first inaccuracy is that as a matter of fact, what I replied to
was not (as I somewhat confused in my recollection) directly the
question that Andrea had asked, but rather the set of thoughts created
in my mind by his words together with a point that John had made in
response:

Quoting John Curran's email of Mon, 4 Jun 2012 08:36:38 -0700:
:On Jun 4, 2012, at 8:08 AM, Andrea Glorioso wrote:
:> On Monday, June 4, 2012, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:
:>
:> > Indeed, ICANN can remove entire top-level-domains (such as a ccTLD)
:> > That is going to be the case for some entity no matter how you set up
:> > Internet governance in this area.
:>
:> What if the authority to take such decision was shared among different
:> entities?
:
:The implementation of such a decision will ultimately occur within a single
:entity, which will exist within the territory of a nation state somewhere.

The second inaccuracy is that the point about the engineering
difficulty of the change to DNSSEC that I had proposed was in fact
not in a posting of John, but in one of David Conrad, whose precise
words were:
: there are technical issues relating to the size of signatures that
: make supporting multiple keys as you suggest quite challenging.
: Revising DNSSEC to add this capability would likely be quite expensive
: and I suspect the cost/benefit analysis would imply it would be
: difficult to get the technical community to revise the specifications,
: update implementations, and deploy the new code, particularly as all
: that effort would need to be done to address a non-technical
: consideration that most in the technical community would view (rightly
: or wrongly) as political window dressing.

Now continuing my response to Andrea's recent posting:
> (As I wrote many times and as it is clearly indicated in the .signature of
> my emails, when I write here, unless I specifically say otherwise, I am
> expressing personal positions, not the positions of the EU Commission. This
> is very important for everyone to clearly understand, otherwise my ability
> to engage in conversations will be severely limited. But maybe this would
> not be a problem :).

In my opinion at least, it would be a very big loss.

> On the specific point you mention, I referred to the possibility for
> multiple countries to have a formal role in the process of modifying the
> root zone. DNSSEC signing is an element of that but, for reasons
> highlighted by others, not necessarily the most important one.

Ok...

I think that it is now getting clearer, in my mind at least, that
there are three aspects that matter here:

a) Trustworthiness of the overall process (including management
decisions, zone signing, and acceptance --or potentially
non-acceptance-- of the signed root zone by rootzone operators)
from the perspective of rational analysis of someone who has
enough understanding about cryptography and other aspects of
security to be able to form an informed person's opinion about
the trustworthiness of what is being done, and who also has
enough interactions with technical community persons to be able
to form an informed person's opinion about the overall
trustworthiness of this technical community in regard to the
robustness against conspiracy attempts.

b) Trustworthiness of this overall process from the perspective
of people who rely on second-hand information for evaluation of
whether that cryptography stuff is some kind of true security or
just theater, and on whether the technical community as a whole
is truly more trustworthy than say dictatorship of a greedy
profit-oriented company, or the government of a banana republic, 
etc.

c) Political window dressing. I would strongly assert that
political window dressing matters. (Would anyone want to buy from a
shop where the window dressing is careless and incompetent?) But
I believe that in order to be credible, political window dressing
needs to be based on what can be trusted to be real, from both of
the perspectives 'a' and 'b' above. I think that at least from a long
term perspective, it would not at all be beneficial to have some
kind of UN theater in which multiple countries participate in some 
ceremony related to approval of changes to the dns root zone while
the HSMs (the hardware devices on which the actual cryptographic
computations for generating the signatures are performed) remain
under unilateral US control.


I am strongly convinced of the desirability of geographically
distributed rootzone signing, because that would, IMO at least,
positively impact all three aspects.

> Let me also point out that, whether the CS and technical "communities" find
> it stupid or not, politics (national and international) are characterized
> by a high degree of symbolism and theater play. That's not all there is to
> it of course, but sometimes process modifications that a techie may
> consider irrelevant can have a huge impact in appeasing public authorities.

I would add that IMO this matters not only from the perspective of
public authorities but also from the perspective of people as a
whole.

> I know this is not necessarily a priority for everyone, although in terms
> of real-politik I would suggest it should.

Good point.

> > If the level of interest is as great as Parminder asserts, this
> > information should indeed result in significant resources getting
> > allocated to that engineering work. I personally will be surprised
> > if this happens anytime soon (my impression is that the level of
> > interest is more on a "nice to have" / "this is something that we
> > rant about if the feature is not there, but we're not willing to
> > pay for the cost of getting it" level) but we'll
> 
> I am not clear whether you are suggesting that public authorities should
> allocate resources here.

Indeed I was not clear.

The main thought was that I was realizing, in a fresh way, that there
is a difference between what one likes to assert in a debate as
important, and what one is willing to allocate significant resources
to if the monetary cost turns out to be high.

Logically, the point that I was trying to make, without having quite
so clearly analyzed it yet, goes a bit like this:

Parminder had asserted that there is a very significant level of
interest, internationally, in greater internationalization of CIR
management.

I assert that this interest could potentially be of one of two kinds:
Is it something governments are willing to expend significant
resources on, or not? This matters specifically in regard to the
DNSSEC change that I had suggested, because I believe that in view
of its difficulty, it isn't going to happen unless someone is willing
to pay for the engineering work to happen.

I furthermore assert that when a reasonably rational government (I
mean this in a sense in which most governments are reasonably
rational, but e.g. Muammar al-Gaddafi's government wasn't) is
informed about what is possible to do, you will then be able to
see from the government's actions the distinction between the two
kinds of interest.

I furthermore (even in the absence of any official confirmation
regarding this) assert my belief that sufficient information about
the "distributed root zone signing" idea has successfully been
communicated to the European Commission so that *if*, from the
European Commission's perspective, enabling this technically is
important enough that the benefit justifies the cost, it's going to
happen.


And finally I encourage others to try also to seek to communicate to
governments about what is possible to do, by means of spending some
money on engineering, to further reasonable policy objectives.


Now to the question whether I am "suggesting that public authorities
should allocate resources here." I didn't quite want to go so far as
to suggest this specifically, because right now I'm not clear in my
mind what changes I would really like to see happen to DNS, and it
might not be good for a significant amount of tax money to be spent
on making changes to DNS before it is clearer what kinds of changes
are more or less desirable/undesirable from the various relevant
technical perspectives.


But generally I'd like to assert the following:

1) It will be very good for governments to send technically
knowledgeable persons to participate in technical discussions and
make sure that aspects which are important to the protection of
fundamental human rights (among which are the right to privacy,
the right to self determination of the peoples, etc.) don't get
overlooked. I believe that public authorities should allocate
resources on this.

2) It will be very good for everyone (not only governments but
also civil society) to work constructively towards creating workable
solutions to whatever issues one describes as problems with one's
words. Such alignment between words and actions is very important.
Trust cannot develop in the absence of such alignment.

3) While in many technical discussions the participation of one
publicly funded public interest advocate with a governmental
perspective may suffice, there are topics where this won't suffice.
In particular, it won't be enough to have a single government-funded
participant in discussions of problems where significant reengineering
work is required, because a public interest perspective is asserted
now which was overlooked at first. Changing course is difficult
even when the reasons for doing so are important.

4) I would suggest that public authorities should be prepared to
allocate resources to fixing results of technical discussion processes
when those results are bad in the sense of inadequate protection of
fundamental human rights. In the topic currently under discussion, the
right of the peoples to self determination is IMO either violated or
at the very least insufficiently protected, so in my view the
allocation of tax money to addressing the problem would not be
misplaced.

5) The specific direction of the technical work on which tax money
would be spent should however not be discussed behind closed doors of
ITU, nor behind closed doors of any other intransparent process
without full opportunity to participate in the dicussions for
everyone who is willing to participate constructively in the
discussion. Rather, a new, appropriate vessel should be created which
is suitable for international discussions about such topics.

6) This vessel, for which I've been suggesting the name "Enhanced
Cooperation Task Force", should be designed so that it can be used
e.g. for developing a "Request For Action" statement that outlines
objectives for the design of DNSSEC improvements to enable
internationalization of the root signing function. It should be
possible to develop such a "Request For Action" statement there
even if there is significant political opposition against
internationalization of the root signing function. (Such opposition
from those who feel that they might lose economic or political
power in the case of such a change should be expected, and the
discussion processes need to be designed for robustness so that
constructive discussion and progress in the preparation of a
"Request For Action" document cannot be effectively prevented by
those who would like prevent or at least delay any change to the
status quo.) Those who are in favor of the greatest possible caution
with regard to any transfer of political authority regarding the root
zone would at the same time also be welcome to develop a "Request For
Action" statement on the basis of their concerns. I would expect a
significant number of people to join both working groups and work
towards making sure that both sets of concerns as well as the possible
policy choices, with the associated risks and trade-offs, are well
explained.

7) This will hopefully result in the creation of "Request For Action"
documents that governments as well as opinion leaders among the
general public will find informative and persuasive.

Greetings,
Norbert

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