From: cooper@utopia.cc.nd.edu (Joel Cooper)
Subject: Re: Information Services Etiquette (was Re: Gopher directories)
Organization: University of Notre Dame
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 17:20:38 GMT

In article <1992Apr13.235227.5469@sifon.cc.mcgill.ca> peterd@cc.mcgill.ca  
(Peter Deutsch) writes:

> Perhaps you should go back and re-read the previous paragraph of
> his reply:
> 
> [* Joel writes: *]
> %> .  .  .  Also I have heard some concern expressed by individuals at  
> %> several academic institutions about "just anyone" being able to set   
> up their own 
> %> Gopher server and start serving up whatever. .  .  
> 
> I understood this to mean that he was advocating control over
> who would be qualified to set up a gopher server, and (given
> that he was replying to my plan for a resource information service)
> who would be allowed to have an entry put into the "phone
> book" of services. Sounds like a pretty obvious case of potential
> censorship to me. 
 
Nope!  Honest, I was not advocating censorship in any way, shape or form.   
I was simply reporting concerns that I have heard from people from  
numerous institutions of higher education.  That's all.  I am not  
advocating anything at this point, I just want the issues up for  
discussion. . .

> BTW, the reason we need some control over who operates a DNS server 
> is because if you operate such a server at level N and such a
> server goes away then it can impact upon the operation of those
> registering at level N+1. Thus, if "mcgill.ca" is broken, then
> "cc.mcgill.ca", "physics.mcgill.ca" and "maths.mcgill.ca" all go
> away, too. We need accountability and control over this information
> to prevent denial of service attacks, so some authority is granted.
> A hierarchial model works in this case.

I would argue the same for the Gopher world.  Besides, there's the neat  
political reality of numerous "official" Gopher servers for a given  
institution.  For the good of everyone I would again recommend the DNS  
model of doing Gophers (granted my view is skewed by my involvement with  
educational institutions) since DNS was developed in order to extend and  
improve services on a growing Internet.  The Internet per definition has  
tended to adopt standards based on successful experimentation and  
RFC-based standards.  Perhaps what is currently going on with CNI and the  
IETF regarding an Internet information architecture will render this  
discussion unnecessary.

> ANd BTW, I would be very disturbed if someone told me that the
> people in charge of DNS top level registrations had started
> limiting who would be allowed to register in DNS to prevent
> "just anyone" from gaining entry. We need authority, but we
> don't need this kind of control.

I appreciate your concern about the control issue.  And frankly, this may  
be up to each individual university (again, my bias) administration to  
sort out the free speech issues as is currently being done on the USENET  
side of the house.
 
> And in the Gopher world, or more generally, in the world of
> generalized Internet service providers that I see coming into
> existance in the next year or two, you do _not_ need or want to
> maintain a strict hierarchy of services. I believe that what we
> will see is a "mesh" of service providers and consumers. We may
> impose a taxomony (or two, or three) to help find things, but we
> may also allow archie-like indexing services as well.

Given they don't eat up network bandwith, yes.
 
> > Do you block out certain replies by the nameserver?!  If not, why  
> would you
> > block out replies by the "service" server?
> 
> Exactly. What was proposed was that the maintainers of the Gopher
> network would not _allow_  "just anyone" to begin offering information
> through a Gopher server. In context, it was being suggested that we 
> should not be willing to publicize "bootleg" servers (really, read it 
> again). Joel does this for the best of motives, but it is still the 
> equivalent of limiting access to the printing presses to "official"
> printers and the dissemination of information about what is in print.
> To me this is censorship and I am against it.
 
Whoa.  
 
> > What I see being proposed is the very reasonable concept that  
> information
> > on resources should be a distributed service. .  .  .
> 
> No, what was proposed was that we limit who would be allowed to set
> up and operate Gopher servers. Now, I'm all for distributed
> information services, where appropriate. I'm against the idea
> that we would limit who would be allowed to offer any particular 
> Internet services.

I urged "caution" in my original response.  There may be concern with the  
model I "proposed", but I don't think the opposite model either scales or  
would be acceptable to a lot of people who either are or want to provide  
information to the Internet community.  Clearly the true path lies  
somewhere in between.  My own biases are on the free speech side of  
things, I am only attempting to bring some honest concerns of people like  
librarians (who must impose order on information, it's their job) into the  
discussion.

> Now, Minnesota is free to not include the server in _their_
> menus, (obviously) but neither they, nor anyone else should be in
> a position to prevent the new server coming  from coming on-line.
> And sorry guys, I am not implying for a moment that the truely
> nice people in Minnesota would ever even try this. I am trying
> to clarify my concern with Joel's concern proposal and acertain
> to what extent Joel's view is shared by other Internet service
> providers).

No one can or should prevent a new server from coming online.  There are  
probably thousands of them we know nothing about.

Once again, I don't endorse censorship.  I do want a model of information  
access developed that will scale beyond 6 months.  Already I hear the  
Gopher world characterized as "chaotic".  Gopher is a tremendous tool and  
I think there are huge opportunities.  We need to discuss the issues  
constructively and also pay close attention to what is being done  
formatively at the CNI and ITEF level of things.  I remain optimistic in  
part because the architects of Gopher are involved in these discussions.

I have cross-posted to one more group (alt.gopher).  You know, it might be  
_real_ interesting to encapsulate this discussion at some point and post  
it to CWIS_L (bit.listserv.cwis-l) and see what those folks might think  
:-)

Joel
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Joel P. Cooper                     Internet: cooper@utopia.cc.nd.edu
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University of Notre Dame           Fax:      219-283-8201
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