Policy Documentation - Rheinland BackboneThis document collects our five different policy sets, concerning administrators and operation of the Rheinland Backbone, courtesy of Freifunk Rheinland e.V.
Purpose
Rheinland Backbone is a transit network. Its purpose is the connection of any access network in the Freifunk Community to the public Internet. Connectivity of the clients is established over IPv4 and IPv6.
Technical Overview
Communities are allocated with a single IPv6 subnet and an IPv4 address (at least 2) for each of their routers (e.g. supernodes). IPv6 connectivity will be native, end-to-end. Due to global IP address exhaustion, it is necessary for the community to assign clients with private IPv4 addresses and use NAT technique for routing into other networks. The Backbone Network does not apply any encryption on traffic routed to or from the internet.
Definitions
Community: Community in relation to this document is defined as group of people who operate a seperate network infrastructure. In some cases this might by a group of people who share a common network infrastructure (meta communities).
Operator: A operator is each person who operates (does have root account) communities systems which are connected the the backbone infrastrucutre.
User: A user is considered a person who connects to infrastructure which is provided by a local Freifunk community.
Global Terms
A Freifunk community is considered a group of people who accept and implement the pico peering agreement
Each Freifunk community is given Backbone transit based on Rheinland Backbone Policy acceptanceCommunities must delegate operation of the backbone connection to designated operators. This should be at least two people.
Each connected community should mention this service and advertise for donations in a way that they deem appropriate
No charge must ever be applied for the usage of this service
The service is not intended to place or distribute any kind of advertisement
The provided service connects to public networks. Every user must take care of his own encryption and security matters
Data-protection is considered as important and the infrastructure more than fully complies with local data protection laws
No one must use the network to harm the freedom of others
No policy rule must be violated to satisfy the need of another rule
Routing Policy
IPv4 is considered a legacy protocol, but will be supported as transition mechanism for an undefined period of time
Internal and external peerings are either IPv6 only or support both IPv4 and IPv6
Net neutrality: every type of packet is treated equally in regard to priority, bandwidth and latency
quality of service cannot be as network feature
The Rheinland Backbone don’t support censorship or filtering of any kind and will act against requests to implement such things. - It will announce censorship and surveillance measures applied (e.g. out of legal reasons) when possible.
Service Level Agreement
No formally formally defined support response times are provided
Services are provided on best effort basis
Community’s operators should cooperate for solving issues
Operations Level Agreement
Abuse-notifications are accepted and distributed via a ticket system
Operators should target to handle assigned abuse requests in a timeframe of 24h
A contracted lawyer should be reachable at any time
Abuse must be treated according to the abuse treatment policy
All operators must act according to the administration policy
Administration Policy
Don’t spy on or collect user’s traffic without a technical reason
Collected logs must be deleted after a finished troubleshooting session
No user information gathered during a debug session should be disclosed at any time
User traffic must only be manipulated to make connectivity possible
Logging volume and scope should be as minimal as possible
Captive portals must not be used to gateway network access
Every delegated operator must take action against threats inside the community’s network if possible
Abuse Treatment Policy
Requests by state authority should be handled by a lawyer
Criminal prosecution with lawful enforcement will not be hindered by Rheinland Backbone
Each abuse-case is handled seriously
Each abuse-case is tried to be answered faithfully within 48 hours
If possible we are going to take action against each occurrence
The Rheinland Backbone is not able to provied any information about the end user
List of open Issues
Should there be a obligation for communities to announce changes? If, which changes?
Should there be a requirement for reachablility of community operators?
Should there by any cirteria for a decision if a community will get connected?
What should be the process of resolving conflicts? What are possible actions for violations/conflicts?