[anti-abuse-wg] anti-abuse-wg Digest, Vol 46, Issue 4

anfernandez at lavanguardia.es wrote:

>But my point of view a few bad
>d guys are doing great harm to the use and distribution of IP addresses as
>the only remedy to defend from those few bad guys is to apply through the
>courts blocking the IP addresses used for illegal purposes...

That... the legal/courts method... is quite certainly not the "only"
method of applying disipline to "bad" networks that connect to the
Internet.

Even now, whenever a network is seen as doing things that are REALLY bad...
like that AS which I outted here some time ago that seemed to only exist
for the purpose of hijacking other people's unused IPv4 address space...
"peer pressure" comes into play and the bad actors are shunned and
ostracized by the others that they connect to, directly or indirectly,
until they no longer have a level of connectivity that is even useful.

In my own country (USA) we have similar sorts of pressure that is occasionally
applied by professional associations that have written codes of conduct,
for example The American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Bar
Association (ABA).  When these organizations find that they have individual
members that are behaving badly and/or in ways that bring dishonor and
disrepute to the organizations (and/or to the professions which they
represent) then these associations kick the bad guys out.

So it is a lie and a (comfortable) falsehood to say that the "only"
means of disiplining bad actors on the Internet is to spend enormous
amount of time and equally enormous amounts of money wading through
some court system, either national of supra-national.  As I've noted
above, EVEN NOW it is possible to shun/ostracize bad actors and thus
effectively force them off the Internet... and on occasion, when the
behavior of individual actors becomes REALLY excessively bad, that
already happens... no courts... no juries... no 10 year and multi-
million dollar lawsuits.

The problem isn't that the whole of the Internet lacks a means to
disipline bad actors and/or to force them off the Internet all on
its own, and without recourse to ridiculously slow and cumbersome
legal systems.  Rather, the problem is that the Internet's own means
for dealing with problems is only applied very very rarely, and
also, it is only applied in a totally ad hoc case by case basis,
without any written rules.

Unlike the mature professional associations I mentioned above, the people
and companies that provide connectivity on the Internet just haven't
grown up enough yet to understand that a written code of conduct is
both (a) useful and (b) necessary, in the long run.  Even suggesting,
as I have done here in the past, that a code of professional conduct
for Internet service providers be discussed, debated, and hopefully
ultimately agreed tends to only elicit shrill shrieks of "Mine! Mine!
Mine!" as if one had just deprived a four year old girl of a favored
teddy bear.  In my view, this does not represent a mature response to
the many and abundantly self-evident problems of the modern Internet,
but here, at least, I seem to be virtually alone in that view.


Regards,
rfg