To be perfectly, bluntly honest the underlying problem is that the internet made several forms of mass communication free or nearly free to end-users. Even sending literally on the order of a billion spam messages per day, as major spammers do, costs little once one has the infrastructure set up and it doesn't require expensive infrastructure, much of it relies more on deception. So now we have to figure out how to deal with such behavior having abandoned the usual limitation that it would cost too much (e.g., to send out a billion messages on paper, or if messages were charged per each.) With little warning or thought we reduced that cost to roughly zero for the senders. There is cost. But it's been transferred to the receivers, both the infrastructure providers who have to provide sufficient infrastructure to handle their share of billions of mail messages per day and other abuse, and to end-users who have to sift through mailboxes which may be 90% or more spam/phishing/unwanted-advertising, etc. There's an effect on society but that's outside of the scope of this. But for example the billions of people on the net might be doing something more useful with their time than sifting through spam. It relies on deception because if a billion messages came from spamco.com we'd just block spamco.com. And this can be extended to many other behaviors such as scripts which crawl looking for message board software which the script knows how to fill with advertising tho that's not generally DNS-related in any way but the economic principle is the same. Hint: If you were thinking of setting up a site using the free WikiMedia software used for Wikipedia you may be in for a lot of frustration. N.B. Personally I tend to not have a problem with "pull technologies", if someone wants to set up and run a site devoted to eating live puppies I don't really care so long as it's not deceptive in nature (e.g., made to look like a Red Cross site and soliciting donations.) So we're thrust into a world with few options having eliminated the most effective in the past -- it used to cost too much to be a huge, global criminal, particularly anonymously. We have the legal structure which isn't very effective when the stock-in-trade is anonymity and often extrajurisdictional sources. We have contracts with parties who might be able to mitigate the problem but that amounts to cost-shifting to those parties which they resent. Where to go? And, this is not a joke: Perhaps AI will find a big win in curating the net better. On September 17, 2023 at 15:09 at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org (Karl Auerbach via At-Large) wrote:
On 9/17/23 2:51 PM, John McCormac wrote:
So rather than focusing on "DNS Abuse (phishing, spam and malware) and Content Abuse (intellectual property and trademark infringement etc)" we ought to focus on the harmful aspects - fraud, misrepresentation, violation of copyright or trademark - rather than on a gear tooth (DNS) in one kind of machinery though which these harmful acts are committed.
That might put ICANN, the registries, and the registrars in the position of being content regulators. I don't think that any of them want that.
I think we may have what in legal circles we call "a distinction without a difference".
At the end of the day, whether we regulate an act via DNS or because of laws against fraud, the end result is regulation of content.
Indeed, until we have widespread systems of remotely operated robotics, pretty much anything we act on on the internet is based on content.
(The exceptions to that are things like response time metrics, which, to my mind, when they pertain to DNS are clearly within ICANN's remit.)
--karl--
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