Zoom Breakout Room 2: Civil Society, Usability and DNS

9 people joined the breakroom of Session 2: Civil Society, Usability and DNS
0-5 minutes: Gurshabad summarized the talks in the second session
5-10 minutes to cover the questions to the talks: All the questions were covered during the talks, no questions asked.
10-25 minutes: discussion

Discussion:
Q: Paul Syverson: what can be done to make balkanization itself costly at an ecosystem level, so protocols that might be resistant to being functional if set up for use in a private space? That is clearly in great tension to modular design and testing. (Easy narrow question what can be done to make
Ram: If we look at the top alexa companies, most of them are based on US and EU. It’s important to let people access these companies. CDN could be an option as the CDN points cannot be blocked.
Gurshabad: even the govt needs access to these endpoints, like CDN. the externality of consolidation is that it is disincentive for balkanisation.
Ulrich Wisser: A country can do whatever they can, we can’t stop that, we need to make one to participate. what is one’s incentive to stay on?
Vijay: China and Russian applies a lot of censorship. It’s hard to find a resolution for such countries.
Ram: if the protocol can consider the censorship when it is designed and standardized, it might be hard for the countries to block
Gurshabad: TLS 1.3 is not usually blocked (because of critical mass)
Ram: you need TLS 1.3 to protect the internet, but it’s not true for Dot and DoH
Vijay: it’s easy to port 853, but it’s hard to block 443. It’s hard to change how a big country applies their censorship.
Han: even we add consideration of censorship in protocol, a country may run their own protocol within the country and translate the protocol to the standard one on the country edge. But we can make the protocol conversion hard.

Gurshabad: looked at the Firefox UI: placement of DoH option matters (whether it is under network settings or privacy, currently it’s under network settings)

What people want to see/ do research in the future?
better education: people are worried that they will break things if they change the default settings. Provide more support (e.g., youtube video) on the Web browser.
privacy policy that can be read within 10 seconds.