[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Who is in charge? (was Re: Why the thin data is necessary)]

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 07, 2017 at 10:55:19AM -0400, Stephanie Perrin wrote:
> These are excellent questions.  I would add an additional one:  why are
> private cybercrime investigators not accredited?  How can the global public
> trust them, or perhaps why?

The above question implies a deep misunderstanding of the nature of
the Internet.

As Phill Hallam-Baker[1] said once, "On the Internet, you are so not
in charge for every value of 'you'."  The reason that Internet private
cybercrime investigators are not accredited is the same reason that
Internet policy people are not accredited, Internet technical
contributors are not accredited, Internet e-commerce site operators
are not accredited, and Internet private fans of dressing up as furry
creatures are not accredited.  In a network of networks, there is no
centre of control because there is _no centre_.  Since there is no
centre of control on the Internet, accreditation in the generic
sense above is completely meaningless.

The way things on the Internet work is _voluntary_ interconnection,
which means that you're a "private cybercrime investigator" if people
who have real legal authority in real legal jurisdictions decide to
rely on and work with your investigations.  You're an ISP if people
decide to use your service provisioning to connect to the Internet.
And so on.

The idea that there is anyone in a position to accredit someone else
for a generic Internet job completely misses the way the Internet
actually functions.  ICANN today can accredit registrars and
registries (and therefore make policies about RDS) because people
agree to let ICANN do this, because it's doing it now and it's hard to
change that.  But if ICANN proves to be too useless for the rest of
the Internet (because, to take an imaginary case, the community around
ICANN thinks it is Boss of da Internetz and so can make rules that
break operational reality without any apparent operational benefit),
then its role in IANA registries will simply be usurped by others, and
people will ignore the ICANN registrars and registries and everything
like that.  I certainly hope we never get there, because it would be
really painful and bad for the Internet.  But it is certainly
possible.  ICANN has no power independent of the agreement of everyone
to use the ICANN policies for the IANA DNS root.  Ask MySpace or the
authors of Gopher whether there are any permanent favourites on the
Internet.

Best regards,

A

[1] of all people

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com