RFC 1087

Ethics and the Internet 🎀

Okay bestie, welcome to RFC 1087 💖 It's a short one from January 1989, and it's basically the Internet's group chat rules, written by the Internet Activities Board (IAB) 👑

Here's the title block tea ☕:

• Number: RFC 1087
• Title: Ethics and the Internet
• Group: Network Working Group 🌸
• Author: the Internet Activities Board (IAB). No individual people are named 🙈
• Date: January 1989
• Category: the title block doesn't have a category field, but the Status of this Memo calls it a statement of policy from the IAB
• Obsoletes / Updates: the title block doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates

Status of this Memo ✨

Okay so the IAB is putting this out as a statement of policy about how to properly use the Internet's resources 🦋 Anyone can read and share it, because distribution is unlimited 🌈

Introduction 🌸

Okay this is giving big energy. A ton of human effort and money, from the U.S. Government, industry, and the academic world, went into building the Internet, which is a bunch of connected networks 💜 It started in the mid-1970's as a place for experimental network research, and now it's a super important national infrastructure ✨ Tons of researchers use it, from computer scientists and electrical engineers to mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers, chemists, astronomers, and space scientists. Literally every field 🔥

Here's the thing: lots of people depend on the Internet every day for their research, the same way we depend on roads, water reservoirs and delivery systems, and the power generation and distribution network 🛣️⚡

The reliable operation of the Internet and the responsible use of its resources matters to everyone: the users, the operators, and the sponsors 🫶 Recent events involving hosts on the Internet and in similar network infrastructures made it clear that every Internet user has a professional responsibility to their colleagues and to the sponsors of the system 😭 A lot of the Internet's resources come from the U.S. Government, so when someone abuses the system, it stops being just a professional ethics thing and becomes a Federal matter 💀

IAB Statement of Policy 👑

The Internet is a national facility, and it's useful mostly because so many people can get to it easily 🌈 Using this critical resource irresponsibly is a huge threat to the technical community keeping access to it 😭

The U.S. Government sponsors of this system have a fiduciary responsibility to the public to use government resources wisely and effectively 💅 It's harder to justify supporting the system when highly disruptive abuses happen 🙈 Access to and use of the Internet is a privilege, and every user should treat it that way 🎀

The IAB really backs the view of the Division Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation Division of Network, Communications Research and Infrastructure. Paraphrasing, they described as unethical and unacceptable any activity that purposely:

• (a) seeks to gain unauthorized access to the resources of the Internet,
• (b) disrupts the intended use of the Internet,
• (c) wastes resources (people, capacity, computer) through such actions,
• (d) destroys the integrity of computer-based information,

and/or

• (e) compromises the privacy of users.

The Internet lives in the general research world, and parts of it are still used to support research and experiments on networking 🧚 Experiments can affect every component and every user, so researchers have a responsibility to be extremely careful with their work ⭐ Being careless with Internet-wide experiments is both irresponsible and unacceptable 💀

The IAB plans to do whatever it can, working with Federal agencies and other interested parties, to find and set up technical and procedural mechanisms that make the Internet more resistant to disruption 🛡️ Heads up though: that kind of security may be super expensive, and it could backfire if it blocks the free flow of information that makes the Internet so valuable 🦋 At the end of the day, the Internet's health and well-being is up to its users, who must, uniformly, guard against abuses that disrupt the system and threaten its long-term viability 🫶✨

Bestie, the whole vibe is: don't be the reason the Internet breaks 💖