[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Why the thin data is necessary

[Michael Peddemors]

+1 as well..

.. but with so many +1's on having that data publicly accessible, it 
would be interesting to take a straw poll, to a wider audience on that 
simple question..

It would be also nice to see what category the parties in each camp lie? 
We know that everyone involved in making the internet a safer and better 
place (security companies, law enforcement et al) want it available, and 
to define 'thin data' as wide as possible, and I can understand that 
some consideration to privacy be considered so that it doesn't go too 
wide, but not really certain I understand the position of those that 
want it as 'thin' as possible, or non-existant, and/or the parties 
behind that position and their numbers.

And of course the ever present question for both camps, is the opinion 
coming from a place where there are financial motivations (not that 
necessarily there is anything wrong with that <sic>) that have formed 
the basis of that opinion. (eg, if the money equation was removed, would 
you still have that opinion, or even be in the conversation?)

For all we know, the privacy camp are in very small numbers in this 
conversation, and while they might hold legitimate positions, maybe it 
isn't enough to affect the directions/positions of ICANN as a group 
going forward.

And IMHO, even if it was 50/50 split, if it came down to two camps, eg 
'the ones keeping us safe' and 'it affects/risks our pocketbooks', I 
would err on policies that would aid the former..

Don't want 'politics' to affect such important decisions..



On 17-06-06 11:22 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On the call today there were arguments being made about why certain
> fields should not be publicly accessible.  In effect, what we are now
> arguing about, in talking about what should be considered "thin data",
> is the definition of the set of data to which unauthenticated access
> should be permitted.  (Let us please not get distracted by what is
> actually required by the RAA or anything like that just now, since the
> outcome of this policy discussion might change that.)
>
> There were several arguments put forth about whether the created on,
> updated on, and expiry dates should be included.  Similarly, people
> discussed whether the domain status values should be included.  I
> believe they must be.
>
> The Internet is unlike many other technologies because of its radical
> decentralization.  That is not some sort of political choice, but
> instead a fundamental part of the design of the Internet: it's a
> network of networks (of networks…) formed by voluntary interoperation
> among the participants.  Participants in the Internet interoperate
> without setting up formal contractual arrangements between all the
> participating parties.  This feature is part of what has made the
> Internet so successful compared to other telecommunications systems,
> because the barrier to entry is really low.  But that design comes at a cost.
>
> The cost is that there's not always a party to speak to, with whom one
> has a pre-existing relationship.  If communications break down between
> two telephone customers, they know whom to call: the phone company.
> The phone company also has contractual (or sometimes treaty)
> relationships to other phone companies.
>
> The Internet doesn't work that way.  If you and I are communicating
> over the Internet, there is no guarantee of direct contractual
> relationships all the way along the transit path: that's what open
> peering policies ensure.  The way we make this work in fact is by
> placing the responsibility for troubleshooting out at the edges.  And
> because of that, when I need to troubleshoot my site I need to have
> tools with which to do that.
>
> In domain-based communications (such as email, IP telephony, websites,
> money transfer, and thousands of other applications), when I encounter
> a problem with the communication I need to answer whether the problem
> is in _my_ network operation, or in the other end.  Important data to
> rule out "the other end" is in the thin RDS data.
>
> Obviously, the nameserver and DNSSEC information in the RDS will allow
> me to tell whether what is in the global DNS is what ought to be
> there.  For instance, if the RDS has one value for the name servers,
> but the DNS returns something else, there is a problem.
>
> Less obvious but just as important are the status values.  If a name
> is on Hold or is pendingTransfer or something like that, it can tell
> me that something is up.  A name that doesn't appear in the DNS but
> has a full complement of name servers in the RDS, for example, might
> be on hold; and I can't tell that without seeing the status values.
>
> In the same way, the dates in the RDS allow a troubleshooter to
> understand what might be wrong when things are broken.  If a name is
> set to expire in a day and you're getting a parking page on the
> website, you have a clue about what is going on.  Most of the examples
> cited in
> https://whoapi.com/blog/1582/5-all-time-domain-expirations-in-internets-history/
> were trivial to understand for help desks that could see that a name
> that should have existed for some time was just hours old, because the
> created_on date was available.  And if you start having trouble and
> see a domain was updated about the same time the trouble started, you
> have a pretty good clue that the problem is most likely at the target
> domain, and not in your own network.
>
> As for the question of why the global Internet infrastructure needs to
> help with this, the answer is that _that's what the infrastructure is
> for_.  We have registrars and registries in order to co-ordinate these
> assignments and make those assignments available, in support of the
> distributed administration and operation of the Internet.  If the
> infrastructure isn't providing this kind of information in order to
> help administrators of various Internet administrators, then it isn't
> doing its job.
>
> The Internet is a distributed system.  If you want to make distributed
> systems work, you have to allow the operators to have enough
> information to do their jobs independently of one another.  So,
> regardless of where one lands on whether any of this data is personal
> data, it makes no difference.  If you want the domain name system to
> continue to work reliably, you have to publish this data.
> Centralization and locking the data up for just registrars simply
> won't scale.
>
> Best regards,
>
> A
>



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