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

Tue Jun 6 22:53:10 UTC 2017

+1000

Sincerely,
Paul Keating, Esq.

> On Jun 6, 2017, at 10:08 PM, Gomes, Chuck via gnso-rds-pdp-wg <gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Andrew.  This is the kind of input that will help a lot in improving our understanding of the usefulness of think data elements.
> 
> Chuck
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org [mailto:gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan
> Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2017 2:22 PM
> To: gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] [gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Why the thin data is necessary
> 
> 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
> 
> --
> Andrew Sullivan
> ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
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