Subject: Re: draft-costanzo-dns-gl-02.txt

From: Eric Brunner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 13:51:44 -0400

Terry Lambert wrote:

> Can someone give a _legitimate_ reason for wanting geographic
> information about machines?

Hi Terry.

I'll get around to listing some reasons for making a mapping from ip addrs
to some representation of spatial locality eventually. Milage will vary of
course for values of "legitimate". [For cookie-cutters not namedroppers,
draft-costanzo-dns-gl is the latest in a series of proposals to (mis)use
the DNS, extending its scope to some form of a geographic resolver. The
cookie-cutter interest is extracting (consent?, PII?) demographics in the
form of geographic identifiers.]

The following is from today's Benton Communications Policy list (a Tribal
Tele/Data wonk-or-grunt-daily-must-read) and it is one application of the
abstraction of territorial jurisdiction to (endpoint) ip addrs. Substitute
"Tribe X" for "Canada" and you'll get the idea why source-or-sink-T-J is of
interest (when I'm wearing _that_ hat).

> ICraveTV, a Canadian Internet company, was forced to shut down earlier this
> year after the major US TV networks objected to its steaming of live network
> programming. The networks and others claimed that the company was
> essentially "rebroadcasting" programming without compensation, which is
> permitted in Canada,  but illegal in the US. Bill Craig, iCraveTV's founder,
> said that the company has now developed a system that can identify users by
> country and would allow it to continue serving Canadians free. Craig says
> that his "iWall" system will "verify if the computer user is in Canada or
> the United States and allow them on or not on." Mr. Craig also said that   
> iCraveTV will charge a fee when it starts up again, functioning much like a
> cable television system.
> [SOURCE: New York Times (CyberTimes), AUTHOR: Barry Brown]                
> (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/cyber/articles/02icrave.html)  

The actual mechanism may be as "good-faith" as resorting to the ARIN block
allocation to infer the applicable territorial jurisdiction, hence the risk
of jurisdiction-specific service provision, or as intrusive as getting the
end-user to assert (possibly without knowledge or consent) the applicable
territorial jurisdiction and assume the risk of upstream compensation.

The possible discussion of uses of some representation of spatial locality,
those Terry touched on (transaction histories, demographics, ...) and some
he didn't (persistent non-verified third-party cookies containing personal
identifable information (PII), 1x1 gif images, etc. -- the webtech's vade
mecum, and the analytical issues they address, as well as the end user's
informed conscent, can be taken to the cookie-cutters mailing list I set up
recently.

	List posting address:     [email-masked]
	List request address:     [email-masked]

I'll write about the marketing utility of locality data in cookie-cutters,
the end result should be something informational or BCP in the User-Services
directorate series.

The locality work which didn't go into the I-Ds I mentioned yesterday
draft-polk-slp-loc-auth-server-00.txt and draft-tang-islf-req-00.txt I'll
write-up after Pittsburg -- as post-Nokia this is just a hobby.

Cheers,
Eric

P.S. If anyone from iCraveTV cares to disclose their endpoint authentication
scheme I'd be happy to see it.

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