The Internet and Centralization
Posted on 2004-09-03 at 08:02
I am disturbed by recent attempts to centralize the Internet's services. Places that ban mail from servers that aren't fully qualified domain names require everyone to go to a provider for SMTP service. Likewise, Microsoft's new Sender-ID proposal to handle the spam problem makes ordinary people devalued in favor of certifying authorities. This is not what the Internet is about. The Internet is a community of peers, not a community of clients looking for servers. On the Internet every computer is and should remain a potential endpoint. Anyone can run a web server and the browser will not deny pages from a server without a DNS entry. Anyone can run an FTP server and the FTP client does not care whether the server has a domain name of just an IP address. They want to fix spam but they want to do it all wrong. There are better ways to fix the problem of spam that do not destroy the foundation of the Internet as a decentralized, peer-to-peer structure. Sender-ID is not a good idea, and neither is any plan that puts control of email in the hands of the centralized DNS system. Lame. Thankfully, Apache has denied Sender-ID any progress in its projects.