Subject: [Dbound] Spencer Dawkins' No Objection on charter-ietf-dbound-00-01: (with COMMENT)

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 14:59:44 -0800

Spencer Dawkins has entered the following ballot position for
charter-ietf-dbound-00-01: No Objection

When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply to all
email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel free to cut this
introductory paragraph, however.)

The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-dbound/

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COMMENT:
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I had one suggestion. This charter is fairly chatty (which is fine),
including examples, but after reading it, I wasn't sure whether I'd be
able to tell whether ibm.com and ibm.co.uk were related. 

I think the answer is "yes", but the charter might be clearer if it used
an example like that.

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:05:03 -0500

Actually, that's one of the questions the WG has to answer, but
perhaps pointing out that _that_ is a deliverable would be good?

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:09:26 -0600

Hi, Andrew,

> perhaps pointing out that _that_ is a deliverable would be good?

That would work for me!

(I'm not sure if I said this clearly - I meant that you'd be able to tell
whether ibm.com and ibm.co.uk were related, or not, not that they obviously
were. Sorry if I was more confused/confusing than usual.

Spencer

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 23:10:14 +0000

I'll send a proper ballot but I also found the text so verbose
it started to be counterproductive. It also started off a bit
too abstract I think, perhaps leading to Richard's confusion.

I'd suggest trying to start from something like "We need the PSL
but it's known to be problematic so better solutions are needed,
ideally one, but maybe more."

It's ok IMO if someone who doesn't know what the PSL is has to
wait a short paragraph to be told.

S.

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From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 15:47:35 -0800

Hi Stephen,

> wait a short paragraph to be told.

We struggled quite a bit to figure out how much background is needed in the
charter for this work.  What you're looking at is the result even after we
sliced it up some.  I imagine it's just hard to gauge what the right amount
of background is:  Are we writing this for an IESG we assume is already
somewhat familiar with the problem space, or for the general community
which might not be?

Happy to hear suggestions about how it could be more brief but still
generally meaningful.

-MSK

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:51:36 -0500

> somewhat familiar with the problem space, or for the general community which
> might not be?
>

You could move even more to the "additional background" section,
perhaps (or perhaps not) with an additional citation or two that sends
people there to look.

I plan, when the WG is created, to move that section out of the
charter and into the WG wiki (and to replace the citation(s) to point
to the wiki).

Barry

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:23:05 -0800

On 1/13/2015 3:05 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> hat's one of the questions the WG has to answer, but

+1

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:29:43 -0800

> charter and into the WG wiki (and to replace the citation(s) to point

Interesting thought.  A similar model -- base + wiki -- recently came up
in a separate-but-unrelated discussion for a document.

The challenge here is whether moving background material out of the
charter creates a barrier that matters.

The reason for the extra material in this charter is that the topic
itself is relatively new, relatively poorly understood, and does not
have readily apparent and easy solution.  All of that creates a need to
level-set readers of the charter.

It might seem that one click to the wiki is no big deal, but it does
create a meaningful barrier.

d/

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Jan 2015 02:20:01 -0000

>perhaps pointing out that _that_ is a deliverable would be good?

It is certainly a question we would like to be able to answer, but at
this point we don't know whether we have a technically feasible way to
do it.

The hardest part of the DBOUND work is balancing what we'd like to do
with what we are able to do.  If we have a design that answers many
questions, but can't answer this one, does that mean we have to give
up?

R's,
John

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 07:34:58 -0800

The nature of this sub-thread has prompted me to wonder at an
unfortunate question:

   Is this topic ready for standardization work?

   It feels as if it is more appropriate for the IRTF, at this point,
until we have a much better understanding of what can/should be done and
why and until there's a reasonable community understanding of those answers.

d/

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Jan 2015 17:24:38 -0000

>From what I've seen in the skirmishes so far, if we could agree on a
concrete problem, we could probably come up with a design to address
it.  But there is little agreement on what the problem is or problems
are, and it often seems that people don't even appreciate how
different the applications are into which the PSL has been shoehorned,
both technically and administratively.

There also seems to be a sentiment that this is an important problem,
therefore we must solve it now.  Add metaphors to bells and cats as
desired.

R's,
John

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 12:28:59 -0500

> this point we don't know whether we have a technically feasible way to

Apparently once again speaking quickly fails me.  What I meant was,
the question Spencer was putting -- "Would I be able to tell whether
these two are related?" is one of the open questions.  It would be
nice to make the answer, "Yes, here's how they're related," but I
agree that we don't know whether that's feasible or high enough
priority.  Again, however, I don't think that's a question to _answer_
in the charter, but to pose.  It's a working group, after all.  It can
do some work.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 12:33:54 -0500

Hi Dave,

>    It feels as if it is more appropriate for the IRTF, at this point,

Since feelings are private states, and since I don't have the same
feeling as you, perhaps you could construct an argument instead?

> why and until there's a reasonable community understanding of those answers.

To be clear, I didn't think that was an argument; it's just assertions
of missing understanding.  

I think we know that there is an array of issues that all arise from
treating the domain names a certain way, and we know that at least
some of those treatments are at best approximations for the actual
intent.  There's a problem statement that outlines this; and indeed
we've even had two different proposals for what to do, which revealed
that there appear to be at least two different styles of need.

What is not apparent is whether these can be handled by a single
system, nor whether they're all actually cases of the same desire or
in fact different desires that happen to be using the same existing
technology.  I _hope_ we don't need to treat that sort of question as
a RG problem.  If so, then there's no excuse for WGs at all: they'd
just be an expensive way of processing a predetermined conclusion
through a group of observers.  That sounds like a massive waste of
time to me.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

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From: Suzanne Woolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 13:25:50 -0500

Hi,

On Jan 14, 2015, at 12:33 PM, Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]> wrote:

> technology.  

FWIW, this matches my understanding of why people have been putting significant effort into trying to spin up a WG.

Even a result of "No, this isn't a problem or set of problems that can be characterized or solved from this direction" can be useful-- see for example (and I may well regret this, but….) the discussions of "equivalence" across DNS names. 

Suzanne

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 14:57:23 -0800

On 1/14/2015 9:33 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>   perhaps you could construct an argument instead?

Sure.

(For reference, I think this topic is important and I'd love to see this
sort of enhancement for the DNS.)

My concern is that the current state of the topic does not bode well
either for producing a highly useful enhancement or for its getting
adopted and used:

1. We have some experience with working group efforts that succeed and
others that fail.  We even have some documentation about this.

   My summary is that the safest approach for working group success is
to start the standards process when there is:

   *  good and shared understanding of the problem space

   *  reasonably good and shared understanding of the solution space,
where a concrete specification that folks resonate with is especially
helpful and, obviously even better when there's some running code for it

   *  strong community pressure to adopt the work

   *  solid promise of substantial community participation in the work.

   There are all sorts of heuristics for gauging the above, for a given
effort, but the current topic is not faring all that well, IMO. I've no
doubt that there are a few folk who are certain they understand the
topic, and the solution choices, but I don't see that clarity showing up
broadly, in community terms.  (For some reason, I keep thinking that our
using the word 'related' as a core label indicates the vagueness of our
understanding, even though I think the work is quite accurate for the
scope of what is intended.)

2.  The DNS community, in particular, has been highly resistant to
substantive changes over the last 25 years.  As such, an effort to add a
capability of such conceptual note as DBound intends strikes me as
needing particular strong signs of satisfying the above bulleted list.

3.  The current drafts are useful documents, but I believe they are
quite some distance from garnering community consensus and, even more
importantly, community adoption pressure.

4.  A particularly good heuristic for community interest is mailing list
activity.  We are not doing well in that regard.

The list is probably longer, but that seems enough for now.

d/

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:47:11 -0500

>    *  good and shared understanding of the problem space

I think that, to the extent we do not have such a good understanding,
we are nevertheless approaching it.  I guess you perceive this
differently.

> helpful and, obviously even better when there's some running code for it

Our biggest problem seems to be that today, there are two techniques
and they both seem to have corners that don't work well for the other
technique.  But that seems to me to be exactly the sort of thorny
problem that a WG is needed to tackle.  Otherwise, we'll have two ways
of doing "the same" thing depending on what kind of application you're
using, and that will be the source of subtle bugs.

>    *  strong community pressure to adopt the work

We seem to have participation from vendors like PayPal, DNS operators
like ICANN and (for that matter) my employer, and browser developers
like Firefox and Chrome.  Perhaps this isn't "strong" pressure, but
it's not nothing.

> scope of what is intended.)

Right.  It's a big topic.  In my opinion, making it smaller just so
that we can claim it's more concrete would not help.

> substantive changes over the last 25 years.

I think your claim is unfair.  You're talking about the same community that
has built and to some extent (more than v6, anyway) deployed DNSSEC,
and that has consistently and enthusiastically participated in DANE.
There certainly are nay-sayers among the DNS community whenever one
suggests anything that represents thinking different than that in RFC
2181, but it's not everyone.  Wouldn't you agree?

> importantly, community adoption pressure.

Is this a suggestion that those of us who have worked on those drafts
would be better to go away, and get them more or less done, and then
come back to the IETF?  If so, what is the reason for the "come back
to the IETF" step?  Why would someone do that?

> activity.  We are not doing well in that regard.

It is true that this list has not been hugely active.  I can take some
of the blame -- I've been busy and have not been tackling the updates
as quickly as I should have been, partly because there seemed in
Honolulu to be a desire to try to work the WG process instead.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 19:52:08 -0800

> scope of what is intended.)

I've been thinking about these points in comparison to other successful
IETF work in which I've participated.  The example I keep coming back to is
WEIRDS.  WEIRDS had a basic goal, namely the replacement of WHOIS with
something more modern.  However, it had two very different use cases, names
and numbers, and there was enormous pressure to keep them separate in order
not to burden one side (which had even developed to prototype implementing
their proposed solution) with the political baggage of the other.   There
was even an insistence that a "nuclear option" be included in the charter,
granting the co-chairs the right to jettison the problematic use case if it
seemed to be blocking the other one.  Nevertheless, by all accounts I've
heard, WEIRDS was a success in that it did manage to come up with a single
solution to both use cases, which is now in the RFC Editor queue.

Back to the DBOUND work: I believe that, even though we again have two
primary use cases here, the community active in this charter's development
does satisfy the points you've addressed, as long as "space" can be
interpreted as "spaces, for which there is some amount of common space".

Given, in particular, that the highly energetic DMARC community is hungry
for the output of this working group, I don't have any concerns that this
work will draw sufficient attention once it gets rolling.  Someone else
(Jeff, perhaps?) will need to comment on the web community's likelihood of
participation for that use case.

> needing particular strong signs of satisfying the above bulleted list.

We do say in the charter that we're constrained against anything in terms
of DNS changes other than registering new RRTYPEs.  The bar has been lower
for that of late, as I understand it.

> importantly, community adoption pressure.

Do initial documents need to have consensus that they're ready to go, or
just that they are reasonable starting points for development?  I was under
the impression that this community agrees that one or both of the documents
already satisfy the latter criterion.

> activity.  We are not doing well in that regard.

I get the impression that this is because the list lately has been
dominated by IETF sausage-making rather than actual technological
discussion.  That doesn't have to be the case, but it might be the
assumption some people are making.  By all means, if there's momentum to do
technical development while others are hacking on the charter, people
should feel free to do so.

-MSK

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 07:02:52 +0100

Hi Andrew & Dave,

> that we can claim it's more concrete would not help.

Right.  And coming back to the alternative that Dave posited, I don't
think the topic is so broad that we could sustain a research group on it
alone. 

On the other hand, it's lamentable that there is no research group for
naming issues.  Way back way back, we had the Name Space Research Group
(NSRG), but that RG was more focused on evolving the earlier work of
Shoch,  Clark & Salzter, and attempting to deal with the new and
different world of NATs, mobility, and the oncoming instabilities.  If
there were researchers who wanted to go look at next generation naming
approaches, the long term evolution of DNS (or whatever the next thing
might be), that would be most welcome (at least from my perspective). 

But we shouldn't wait on such musings to realize to move forward on dbound.

Eliot

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Jan 2015 19:26:26 -0000

>technique.

I think we have a worse problem in that different applications ask
very different questions.  The only thing they all have in common is
that the PSL currently gives the least wrong easily available answer.
I still don't see people (not you) appreciating how different these
questions are.

The cookie application has two names, and asks whether they're
under the same management.

The DMARC application has one name and asks what's the "highest"
name where it can look up a _dmarc record.

The CA application has one name, asks for the "highest" name typically
to look for WHOIS information.  It also asks whether a name is a
"private" one that is unlikely to have subdomains delegated to
unrelated entities.

There are probably other questions, too.  Beyond that are management
issues, notably whether name owners publish their own info, or it is
published by a third party as the PSL is.

We've made some progress cataloging the questions, but people are
chronically wanting to jump ahead and answer whichever question
they're interested in with insufficient consideration of what that
does for the other questions, and what assumptions they're making
about the management model.

R's,
John

---

From: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:24:28 -0500

>> perhaps pointing out that _that_ is a deliverable would be good?

Me too, I agree with Spencer's point and question here.  Thanks.

-- 

Best regards,
Kathleen