Principles for the Involvement of Intermediaries in Internet Protocols
draft-thomson-tmi-01
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Martin Thomson
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2021-01-03
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Network Working Group M. Thomson
Internet-Draft Mozilla
Intended status: Informational 4 January 2021
Expires: 8 July 2021
Principles for the Involvement of Intermediaries in Internet Protocols
draft-thomson-tmi-01
Abstract
This document proposes a set of principles for designing protocols
with rules for intermediaries. The goal of these principles is to
limit the ways in which intermediaries can produce undesirable
effects and to protect the useful functions that intermediaries
legitimately provide.
Discussion Venues
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
Discussion of this document takes place on the IAB Model-T list
(modelt@iab.org), which is archived at
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/model-t/.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/martinthomson/tmi.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 8 July 2021.
Thomson Expires 8 July 2021 [Page 1]
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text
as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. What is Meant by Intermediary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Intermediation Is Essential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Intermediation Is Useful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Intermediation Enables Scaling Of Control . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. Incentive Misalignment at Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. Forced and Unwanted Intermediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. Contention over Intermediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
9. Proposed Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9.1. Prefer Services to Intermediaries . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9.2. Deliberately Select Protocol Participants . . . . . . . . 9
9.3. Limit Capabilities of Intermediaries . . . . . . . . . . 10
9.3.1. Limit Information Exposure . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
9.3.2. Limit Permitted Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
9.3.3. Costs of Technical Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . 11
10. Applying Non-Technical Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
11. The Effect on Existing Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
12. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
13. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
14. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Appendix A. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1. Introduction
The Internet owes much of its success to its application of the end-
to-end principle [E2E]. The realization that efficiency is best
served by moving higher-level functions to endpoints is a key insight
in system design, but also a key element of the success of the
Internet.
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This does not mean that the Internet avoids a relying on functions
provided by entities in the network. While the principle establishes
that some functions are best provided by endsystems, this does not
exclude all intermediary functions. Some level of function in the
network is necessary, or else there would be no network. The ways in
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