IABOPEN @ IETF 124
Chairs: Jana Iyengar & Tommy Pauly
When: Thursday 6 November 2025, 11:30-13:00 UTC-5
Where: Place du Canada
Summary
The IABOPEN session provided updates on various IAB initiatives,
including new work assistance, ongoing technical programs, and reports
from recent workshops. A significant portion of the session was
dedicated to an invited talk on ETSI's activities, exploring potential
collaboration with the IETF, and a report on the joint IAB/W3C TAG
workshop on age-based online content restrictions. The session concluded
with an invited talk detailing the technical impact and collateral
damage of Italy's "Piracy Shield" content blocking platform. Discussions
highlighted the IETF's role in providing technical guidance in
policy-driven areas, the complexities of inter-SDO collaboration, and
the critical importance of architectural considerations in internet
governance.
IAB Update
Slides: Chair Slides
IAB Documents
Technical Programs
IAB Workshop on IP Address Geolocation
WSIS+20 Update
The IAB has submitted input to the WSIS+20 process in two statements:
- Input to the Elements Paper
- Input to the Zero Draft
ETSI Discussion (Diego Lopez)
Slides: Getting to Know ETSI: What It Does and How
- Diego Lopez, speaking as an individual with involvement in both
organizations, provided an introduction to ETSI. He described ETSI
as a standards organization, originally focused on European
telecommunications but now globally engaged in ICT standardization,
cybersecurity, and IoT, with over 900 members.
- ETSI publishes all standards free of charge and offers open access
to drafts. It is officially recognized by the European Union and
provides technical guidance.
- ETSI's technical activities include Technical Committees
(member-only, EU-linked), Industry Specification Groups (open to
non-members), Software Development Groups (open source communities),
and Specialist Task Forces (expert-hired work). It also hosts global
partnerships like 3GPP and OneM2M.
- Deliverables range from normative specifications and informative
reports to reference implementations and "demonstrative
deliverables" (experimental results like Plugtests and Proof of
Concepts).
- Areas of relevance to IETF include networking, cloud computing, IoT,
network virtualization, automation, and security (including lawful
interception).
- Diego Lopez highlighted ETSI's request for a formal liaison
relationship with the IETF, emphasizing that the IETF LLC addresses
previous legal status concerns. He suggested that stronger
collaboration could involve formal MOUs and mutual awareness, or
less formal engagement to apply IETF work to specific industry needs
(e.g., railroad, telcos) that may not be "internet at large"
concerns.
- Discussion on ETSI's status as a global vs. European-centered
organization ensued, with some individuals emphasizing its global
reach (e.g., chairs from Japan/China) and others noting its unique
relationship with EU mandates, which can lead to divergent
standardization efforts. The sense of those present indicated that a
formal liaison could help avoid duplication and facilitate mutual
referencing of standards.
Age Restriction Workshop Summary (Mark Nottingham)
Slides: Age-Based Restrictions on Content Access
- The 2.5-day workshop included diverse participants from IETF, W3C,
tech vendors, civil society, and government, operating under a
modified Chatham House rule.
- Report is being produced
- IAB and/or W3C (TAG) may consider additional work (e.g., statements)
- Some discussion of specific technical work already (see eg DISPATCH)
- Coordination function still uncertain
Key observations and takeaways:
- Effective collaboration across technical, policy, and vendor
communities is crucial but currently lacking.
- Technical solutions alone are insufficient; a "whole of society"
approach is needed.
- Clear definitions of roles and a common vocabulary are important.
- There is no single "silver bullet" technical solution; a blended
approach is necessary to address diverse situations and edge cases
(e.g., age estimation vs. government ID).
-
The IAB and W3C TAG plan to produce a report by the end of the year.
-
Information sharing and privacy concerns related to age verification
services were highlighted, with a suggestion to investigate ongoing
research in this area and integrate measurement aspects into
architectural designs.
- The need for continuous engagement mechanisms for coordination
across stakeholders (policymakers, technical community, civil
society) was emphasized, as the issue is larger than any single SDO
can address.
Invited Talk (Raffaele Sommese, University of Twente)
Slides: Disrupting the Internet in the name of copyright: An Italian
Story
- Raffaele Sommese presented a study on Italy's "Piracy Shield"
platform, designed to block illegal streaming content, noting
similar initiatives are being considered globally.
- The original 2023 law mandated blocking of IPs and domains for
sole illegal football streaming activity within 30 minutes, with
no unblocking. This led to significant collateral damage, including
the blocking of Cloudflare, Imperva, and Google Drive (for over a
day).
- A 2024 law update softened criteria to predominantly illegal
activity, introduced a 5-day unblocking request window (but the
block list remains private), and mandated global DNS provider
compliance and ISP reporting of suspicious user activity.
- The study found that Piracy Shield grants private entities embedded
blocking powers, lacks transparency, and causes widespread
collateral damage. AGCOM's defense, based on the sheer number of
blocked resources, was critiqued as an ineffective metric.
- By reconstructing the block list (from a leaked GitHub repo and
AGCOM's verification portal), the study identified over 10,000 IPv4
addresses and 400,000 FQDNs blocked from Feb 2024 to June 2025, with
98% of IPs and 44% of FQDNs remaining blocked.