On 04/08/2014 10:54 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
Having open mail relays used to be considered
acceptable.
Correct. And it, too, was a paradigm change. But it had a very
strong basis and very broad-based understanding and support.
There is an interesting assumption here, and I wonder whether it's worth
examining it: that broad-based understanding is a necessary predecessor
to a paradigm change.
Historically for email and broadly for most other Internet functions
today, large participants were numerous, so much so that - arranging by
user count - the organisation at the 50% percentile had dozens of
organisations above it. This is no longer true for email, which has at
least two important consequences:
* A very small number of participants' decisions will shape the entire
system. These decisions may well be made better individually or in
private consultation than in a public, consensus-driven way.
* That same small set of participants are very high priority targets
for criminals.
Neither of these would appear to be well served by a requirement for
broad-based understanding, let alone support, to be a precondition for a
paradigm change. I'm not at the point where I can propose a better
option, I am merely observing that one of the Internet community's
deepest values ("rough consensus and running code" and its successors)
may in fact be inappropriate in this situation.
That fact that this discussion is not happening on an IETF mailing list
may be relevant also. Clearly, John could have decided to post to
dmarc@ietf instead, but the mere existence of this list, its subscriber
base and the organisation that spawned it (and DMARC) points to the
problem. Were this merely a situation where some people who were unable
to play nice with others were therefore only able to make progress in
private, at least initially, then it could be perhaps be ignored, but
that's only part of the story. The group-consensus approach was tried,
hard, for a decade and failed repeatedly (-all/o=-/discardable).
It's a bit of a stretch, but there's also an evolutionary parallel: some
organisms end up over-specialising and find themselves trapped in a
diminishing niche, unable to adapt. Their cousins who gave up the niche
earlier have a better chance of adapting and surviving. Attempting to
sustain all of the email system's current capabilities until everyone is
willing to give them up is a great way to sustain what we have, but may
not be an optimal way forward.
I've earlier hazarded a guess that Yahoo! ascertained that the breakage
that it would cause was smaller than the benefit that it would gain.
Moving onto even shakier ground, I'll extrapolate and suggest that this
may be true for the entire email system, that disrupting mailing lists
and newspaper website mail-a-friend services may in fact turn out to be
rounding error and so the disproportionate attention given to mailing
list concerns should in fact be relaxed.
- Roland
--
Roland Turner | Director, Labs
TrustSphere Pte Ltd | 3 Phillip Street #13-03, Singapore 048693
Mobile: +65 96700022 | Skype: roland.turner
[email protected] | http://www.trustsphere.com/
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