RFC8890: The Internet Is for End Users
It&#x27;s good to put a stake in the ground for the IETF to create clarity about what they do and why. Countries like China, the US, Australia, and the UK are of course interested in controlling the flow of information for political, ideological, military and other reasons. Therefore they are interested in controlling what the IETF does and how. That&#x27;s the nature of any big country or entity (including companies). E.g. Apple kicking competitors out of the app store is exactly the same kind of behavior. Whether that&#x27;s good or bad is a separate discussion.<p>The reason the internet exists at all is that it provided a way around &#x2F; relief from this level of control and that it allowed independent innovation to happen. In a way this was a happy accident because a lot of the funding for the R&amp;D behind this came out of cold war era defense projects which were very much not about the free flow of information. So, it would be a stretch that this is working as intended. But it was successful exactly because of that and the IETF brought together the right parties to ensure it kept enabling this.<p>More strict networks ultimately failed to compete because users and companies found that they needed to tap into this free flow of information. The fact that countries like China, Russia, North Korea, etc. are on the internet at all (grudgingly and with all the restrictions that they try to enforce) is because they need to be. They are also part of the world economy for the same reason. And as much as they&#x27;d like to tell others what the value of their own currencies should be relative to $, renminbi, euro, etc.; they have no choice but to leave that to market forces. Of course it doesn&#x27;t stop them from trying to influence and manipulate that. Nor does it stop anyone else from doing so. But ultimately it leads to either hyper inflation or people just swallowing their pride and accepting or paying in dollars for stuff they buy (e.g. oil) or sell on the international market. The internet is the same; it&#x27;s a take it or leave it kind of thing. Either you are on it or you are not.<p>It is a bit of neutral ground where mutually hostile entities looking to control, monitor, and manipulate each other can conduct their business (some of it very bad business). It works precisely because things like https prevent man in the middle attacks, certificates keep us honest (to some extent). All the other technical tooling the IETF standardized to ensure third parties don&#x27;t mess with private interactions between two parties trying to have some meaningful interaction is there for just that reason. Of course the tools are far from perfect and there&#x27;s an arms race between intelligence agencies to exploit loop holes, bugs, design flaws, etc. The IETF&#x27;s role is to address these issues, not to create more of them to enable authoritarian regimes to gain an edge over other nations or their own citizens.<p>So, DNS over HTTPS is a good thing and exactly the right thing for the IETF to be standardizing because it fixes a problem with what they previously standardized (i.e. DNS). It&#x27;s controversial because it takes away power from countries actively abusing that power. But the fact that others are exploiting protocol weaknesses in DNS is fundamentally a bug and not a feature. You could argue DNS over HTTPS is not a perfect solution or that better solutions exist but not that the role of the IETF is to enable the Chinese to have a say in what people (in or outside China) lookup via DNS. That&#x27;s not their role. If the Chinese, the Australians, etc. want to block people that choose to configure their browsers to use this (or browsers that do this by default), that is of course their good right. But enabling that kind of self isolation is not a core IETF function.