Hi Susan, >So. Please don't take this personally, as I >didn't take your posting here. But I disagree >with you. Gosh no. As a professional colleague, disagreement is what the business is all about! >FCC has said ip-enabled services (which it defines as everything The instruments providing statutory authority to most domestic and intergovernmental regulatory agencies in the communications is relatively all-encompassing. This evolved pragmatically as new communication technologies have emerged over the years. What doesn't change, however, are the operational needs, the disputes and controversies, and the public interest considerations. That's why the list of 13 perennial mandates I posted, have pretty much endured for the past 150 years, and why the related governmental organizations have broad jurisdiction. So the "defines everything" should come as no surprise. >You say the FCC has been making rules about these things for 30 >years. They have been doing so for telephones. They have not been >doing so for email, IM, web pages, and p2p services. They don't >have jurisdiction to do so, in my view. We'll have to agree to disagree here. When this topic was visited in the Computer II proceeding, the Commission quite emphatically asserted jurisdiction, and took diverse actions over the subsequent years in the form of regulatory mandates on carriers to support the infrastructure for these services. It largely eschewed implementing further mandates on the services or service providers themselves. There are, however, some specific service examples. For example, in conjunction with the AOL-Time Warner merger, the Commission imposed competitive protocol mandates on AOL with respect to IM. Several years ago, MCI petition petitioned the FCC to create the IP Relay Service designed to meet disability assistance mandates and subject to regulation as an IP-enabled service in order to get access to universal service funds. The petition was granted. In the late 90s, the FCC began implementing CALEA mandates relative to IP-enabled services - and related actions are continuing today. The increased "scale" of IP-enabled services produced infrastructure vulnerabilities, specific service vulnerabilities, and monumental increases in criminal behavior - all of which have resulted in increased legislative authority to multiple government agencies, as well as the exercise of that authority. >but that doesn't mean it can impose "social policies" itself on >ip-enabled services. This rather pejorative characterization seems inappropriate. It's really not clear which of those mandates are "social." Most are quite pragmatic requirements associate with just about any large-scale infrastructure. Having been up on the Hill yesterday participating in the 911 Institute's Congressional Caucus lunch on public safety needs for VoIP, you might find it difficult to respond to the emergency call center operators present in dismissing their needs as "social." >I see them as a very broad set of proposed rules, for a potentially >unlimited set of services and applications, that may implicate areas >that are far beyond the FCC's jurisdiction. The Commission needs to begin somewhere. It proceeds by defining classes of services and applying mandates. You seem to be advocating that in an IP-enabled services world, governments just go away, and let chaos reign. That doesn't seem like a very viable approach. >the market is solving that problem without national telecom >agencies getting involved. If you use SpamAssassin or other >useful tools (or adopt the accountable net approach), you >won't get spam. This is just not the case. If you want to dig further on the technical side, consider MARID within IETF. The solution ultimately lies in mandated authentication. You can't drive a truck on the highway without an operator's and vehicle license, so what's the problem with requiring authentication for a server and its responsible operator? Lastly, we shouldn't forget about the rest of the world. For the most part, these esoteric debates about authority over IP-enabled services are largely US-centric - as well as a legacy artifact arising from the serendipitous move of Steve Lukasik from DARPA's Director to FCC's Chief Scientist in 1979. In the 1990s, Steve re-vectored his efforts to help bring about the Cybercrime Treaty, among other things. Times change, things scale. --tony