RING-RING. RING-RING.
3am. The phone goes off. RING-RING.
Uuuurrrrghhhhhhhhhhh. You pick it up. It goes dead. Again.
Now, this little scenario can take one of two paths. The first is the one you already know: next morning, you call the customer service department of your friendly local telco, and lodge a complaint. Their investigation bureau traces the call, aggregates data from multiple complainants, and initiates punishment to the nuisance caller.
The other path is the one you potentially face in future with an IP-based solution like Skype which doesn’t have strong “reverse identity tracability” built in. Who do you complain to? Nobody. You can’t easily recover the real identity of a perpetrator of a social nuisance on Skype. But that isn’t real problem.
There is a reason Skype doesn’t socially scale beyond an initial communitarian group of users. It is because no identity collateral is put up when initiating a communication on Skype. That collateral doesn’t have to be traceable back to me personally. Even if I call you every night at 3am with a pre-paid cell phone that I bought for cash, a punishment can be exacted for abuse of the service: I can simply be cut off. I then lose the value of the phone, plus the number associated and the social connections it brings me. My caller ID wasn’t spoofable or hidden.
The user identity of a PSTN telephony user is welded to the transport and its associated economic transactions (account or handset purchase): the exact opposite of the separation of connectivity and service that the end-to-end model suggests.
On Skype, Free World Dialup, and similar systems not linked to a biometric person or a reversible economic transaction (like provisioning a phone), you’re stuck. In fact, Skype is worse than Free World Dialup - you aren’t even being directly contacted by your correspondent (so no IP address to work from), and the protocol is completely proprietary so you can’t decode what’s going on.
In a sense, a phone number is a personal brand or identity that you place “at risk” by using it. The mere act of being issued a telephone number hooks you into a legal, regulatory and social framework.
The Internet is providing new means of creating “at risk” identity collateral. For example, this blog and the name “telepocalypse.net” has taken a certain amount of my time and money to produce. Abuse of the service (e.g. through libel, or copyright infringement) could result in a lawsuit and loss of that investment. It is possible to find out who the infringer is (little ‘ol me!), even if all you have is their DNS record. If my blog name came up as my verified caller ID, it would still have the useful anti-abuse feature, if somewhat weakened.
Comment spam on blogs is another example of an open communication system that demands no identity collateral, and therefore has no recourse in the face of abuse.
Identity is central to making an open communication system socially scale. The E164 telephony numbering space has subtle value that differs from DNS or anonymous systems. The loss of that value might only be noticed after it has gone away and social ills start to afflict our communication ecosystem. Caveat communicator.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 04:46 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/22.
Indeed. I speak about this a lot on the SIP Wiki. Please come on over and contribute:
http://www.toyz.org/cgi-bin/sipwiki.cgi
In particular, see the pages under the 'Technical' heading, such as 'SIP Security and SPAM Prevention' and 'SIP Security overview'. SIP already implements header integrity though SMIME, but it is not widely deployed yet, and a PKI infrastructure and key exchange method must be adopted. I plan to work on as a major push next year.
Posted by: at November 18, 2003 06:59 PMMorality by consensus is frequently morality by convenience.
Posted by: at December 10, 2003 04:45 PM