On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu> wrote:

Open questions we need to decide about:

1) What exactly would we pay for?

As you said, reimbursing users for hosting is probably the best idea

here, however, we also don't want to get in the situation where users

feel that they _must_ be reimbursed to run an exit relay. What happens

if the sponsors funding dries up in a year and no one wants to donate

bandwidth anymore?

Perhaps only registered companies should be sponsored — as much as I

hate to limit the scope of the project, I think this (might) prevent

abuse to a certain extent. Individuals who wanted to run an exit relay

of their own could still do so, they would just have to use some of

the money to form an LLC (or whatever their countries equivalent is if

the scope of this project extends outside of the US). This gives them

a bit more of an incentive to separate their Tor node form their

personal server/computing resources (in the form of limited

liability), which they should probably be doing anyways.

I think we should aim to constrain ourselves to talking about >=100mbit

exits

I disagree; as others have said, lots of 10mbit relays will do as much

for the network as a few 100mbit relays. Most peoples use case is

simply checking email, browsing the web, reading news, etc. which

don't necessarily need a huge 100mbit relay.

2) Should we fund existing relays or new ones?

It's probably not wise to distinguish between the two. If you only

fund new relays, you may see a lot of old relays shut down (and then

restarted as "new relays" to get funding). So you might as well just

sponsor both. More thoughts on this in a bit.

- Should we prefer big collectives like torservers, noisetor, CCC,

dfri.se, and riseup (which can get great bulk rates on bandwidth and are

big enough to have relationships with local lawyers and ISPs), or should

we prefer individuals since they maximize our operator diversity? I think

"explore both approaches" is a fine first plan.

"Explore both approaches" sounds good; I think we'll find that

operator diversity leads to a healthier (more anonymous) network.

Again, I lean towards small guys that will run a few nodes at

different data centers, but not Sole proprietorship's.

- For existing relays who pay for hosting…

Picking a certain monthly transfer target might solve this; so

existing relays that are fast could apply for aid, and it would give

slower relays incentive to speed up. The challenge then becomes, where

do we set this cutoff? I'm inclined to think it could be kept

relatively low and still be very beneficial for the network.

the Tor network must not end up

addicted to external funding. So long as everybody is running an exit

relay because they want to save the world, I think we should be fine.

This is the core of the entire discussion. We might also consider only

funding relays in areas where we need the diversity by taking into

account…

There's network diversity (AS / upstream network topology), organization

and operator diversity, jurisdictional (country) diversity, funding

diversity, data-center diversity, and more.

…this stuff.

7) How do we audit / track the sponsored relays?

How should we check that your 100mbit relay is really working? What do

we measure to confirm its capacity? To a first approximation I'm fine

assuming that nobody is going to try to cheat (say, by colluding with

an ISP to write legit-looking invoices but then just split the money).

Probably better to monitor this carefully from the get-go. Sponsors

like to know where their money is going, and continued funding could

hinge on it.