11 ms·

RFC8890: The Internet Is for End Users

306 points by pimterry 6y ago

xg15 6y ago
> Because of the global nature of the Internet, it wouldn’t be possible to pursue a bilateral or regional style of governance; decisions would have to be sanctioned by every government where the Internet operates. That’s difficult to achieve even for vague statements of shared goals; doing it for the details of network protocols is impractical. In all honesty, maybe that would be the better alternative, if the only other option is US tech companies deciding unilaterally for the whole internet.
- bjo590 6y ago
  US based tech companies are making those decisions for the whole internet because internet users are voting for US based tech companies' influence with their time, attention, and clicks. It's open and democratic.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Not really since most people don't know they even have a choice let alone that they are making one in any particular direction.
anilakar 6y ago
The IETF strives to create the best technical solution for given specifications. That's its task. Where those specifications come from is a related but separate issue.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  > ‘Best' doesn't mean the choice that has the most companies supporting it; it’s the one that has the best technical arguments behind it. > If the IETF were to only decide upon technical merit, how would it balance these interests? > Over the years, these questions have become increasingly urgent, because it isn’t viable to make decisions that have political outcomes but explain them using only technical arguments. The article explains that that is necessary but not sufficient. It goes on to argue this with examples and explicit justifications. It even has an entire section dedicated to explaining why having it your way would not work. I'm not sure where your comment is coming from though. Who are you to decide how they will do their work? It seems they have decided for themselves and it's in conflict with what you want. Then we don't know why you want this because you haven't provided any reason, reference to authority or any other clues. From my perspective, the IETF and their standards don't exist in a vacuum and their actions have consequences, sometimes of an ethical nature. They seem to agree. It seems prudent that they come to a consensus on what their ethics are, document them and try to abide by them. It's just a case of having a consistent and open policy on a matter which can't be avoided. That is, they will do right or wrong whether they document their intention or not since their actions sometimes have such ethical consequences. Why stick one's head in the sand?
- ergl 6y ago
  Seems like IETF's mission statement disagrees with you: > The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of resources. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935
  - wyc 6y ago
    Also, the IETF has no formal membership roster or membership requirements, and all participants and managers are volunteers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jillesvangurp 6y ago
It's good to put a stake in the ground for the IETF to create clarity about what they do and why. Countries like China, the US, Australia, and the UK are of course interested in controlling the flow of information for political, ideological, military and other reasons. Therefore they are interested in controlling what the IETF does and how. That's the nature of any big country or entity (including companies). E.g. Apple kicking competitors out of the app store is exactly the same kind of behavior. Whether that's good or bad is a separate discussion. The reason the internet exists at all is that it provided a way around / relief from this level of control and that it allowed independent innovation to happen. In a way this was a happy accident because a lot of the funding for the R&D behind this came out of cold war era defense projects which were very much not about the free flow of information. So, it would be a stretch that this is working as intended. But it was successful exactly because of that and the IETF brought together the right parties to ensure it kept enabling this. More strict networks ultimately failed to compete because users and companies found that they needed to tap into this free flow of information. The fact that countries like China, Russia, North Korea, etc. are on the internet at all (grudgingly and with all the restrictions that they try to enforce) is because they need to be. They are also part of the world economy for the same reason. And as much as they'd like to tell others what the value of their own currencies should be relative to $, renminbi, euro, etc.; they have no choice but to leave that to market forces. Of course it doesn't stop them from trying to influence and manipulate that. Nor does it stop anyone else from doing so. But ultimately it leads to either hyper inflation or people just swallowing their pride and accepting or paying in dollars for stuff they buy (e.g. oil) or sell on the international market. The internet is the same; it's a take it or leave it kind of thing. Either you are on it or you are not. It is a bit of neutral ground where mutually hostile entities looking to control, monitor, and manipulate each other can conduct their business (some of it very bad business). It works precisely because things like https prevent man in the middle attacks, certificates keep us honest (to some extent). All the other technical tooling the IETF standardized to ensure third parties don't mess with private interactions between two parties trying to have some meaningful interaction is there for just that reason. Of course the tools are far from perfect and there's an arms race between intelligence agencies to exploit loop holes, bugs, design flaws, etc. The IETF's role is to address these issues, not to create more of them to enable authoritarian regimes to gain an edge over other nations or their own citizens. So, DNS over HTTPS is a good thing and exactly the right thing for the IETF to be standardizing because it fixes a problem with what they previously standardized (i.e. DNS). It's controversial because it takes away power from countries actively abusing that power. But the fact that others are exploiting protocol weaknesses in DNS is fundamentally a bug and not a feature. You could argue DNS over HTTPS is not a perfect solution or that better solutions exist but not that the role of the IETF is to enable the Chinese to have a say in what people (in or outside China) lookup via DNS. That's not their role. If the Chinese, the Australians, etc. want to block people that choose to configure their browsers to use this (or browsers that do this by default), that is of course their good right. But enabling that kind of self isolation is not a core IETF function.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
So if an end user tries to request a page from this site without using SNI, instead of an just an HTTP error code, they get this lovely little piece of snark: This Web site requires a more modern browser to operate securely; please upgrade your browser. The truth is it just requires SNI server_name in the ClientHello. I don't send SNI except on sites that require it. Not every site is on a shared IP; some still use dedicated IPs. So I am the end user reading HTTP headers. I always thought this addtional "message" from mnot.net was somewhat presumptive for an IETF person who claims to be some sort of user advocate. This is the kind of thing I usually see from web developers telling you to "upgrade" your browser or turn on Javascript for the best "user experience", not IETF folks. Maybe it's a default on some server software, not custom. His site does TLS1.3 but it doesn't do ESNI/ECH so I guess some browsers (or other clients) can be a little "too modern".
- vertex-four 6y ago
  In practice, I reckon you might be the only person in the world - or maybe one of a dozen - who has this problem. And in that context that's not snark at all, it's an accurate description of what is most likely the cause of the error.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    > an accurate description except it's a lie. SNI isn't "more secure", it leaks information to a possible MITM.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      So use ESNI.
    - mnot 6y ago
      It's actually a relic of when I was testing to see how broad SNI adoption was -- see https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_youre_sniing https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_yo...
    - 6y ago
tW4r 6y ago
I was really hoping this to use the same phraseology as technical RFCs including MUST, MAY, SHOULD, etc. For example: The task force MUST prioritize... the user MAY expect...
xg15 6y ago
> For example, the recent standardisation of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) pitted advocates for dissidents and protestors against network operators who use DNS for centralised network management, and child safety advocates who promote DNS-based filtering solutions. If the IETF were to only decide upon technical merit, how would it balance these interests? I neither like DoH nor in general arguments of the form "X is not political, we only decide on merits". However, in this case, I really wonder if the IETF's contribution is political: DoH on it's own is highly so, but to my understanding, the politics are in the decision to design an encrypted, centralized and block-proof alternative to DNS with preselected servers and automatically deploy it to millions of users. But those points belong the initial requirements and the deployment process - not so much the technical details of implementation. That DoH is a standard makes some difference, but not very much. I think we'd have roughly the same problems (though maybe with less publicity and discussion) if this was some properietary Chrome thing that was fully developed inside Google. Or to put it differently, assuming it was already decided that something like DoH should be built, is there still political power in the follow-up discussions about how it should be built?
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > ...and child safety advocates who promote DNS-based filtering solutions. DoH doesn't prevent filtering. Sure, it doesn't respect OS or Network-enforced settings, but that's kind of the whole point of its existence. > ...DNS for centralised network management. DoT (and DNSCrypt?) would arguably be the better alternatives in these cases. So, use-cases are absolutely being addressed in DNS' case at the very least. > I really wonder if the IETF's contribution is political: DoH on it's own is highly so... I think DoH and ESNI are exactly the kind of response expected from a tech firm like Mozilla: Fight for its users and invest in the right technology that helps keep the Internet global despite the many efforts to dismantle it, not just by governments but by big tech in equal measure. In fact it is big tech that sells "cyber security" solutions to these governments in the first place: A trillion dollar market opportunity [0]. Look no further than ITU to see how anti-user, pro-corporate, pro-government politically-influenced technology standards can be [1]. Things might take a steep dive given Google's [2] and Facebook's [3] recent inroads in the Communications industry. This pro-user political engagement from Mozilla et al is more than welcome, in my opinion. [0] https://foundationcapital.com/cybersecurity-the-next-trillion-dollar-market/ https://foundationcapital.com/cybersecurity-the-next-trillio... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416269 [2] https://www.opennetworking.org/ https://www.opennetworking.org/ [3] https://telecominfraproject.com/ https://telecominfraproject.com/
luord 6y ago
Seems like an attempt of making "fight for the users"—which should be everyone's rule zero—textual, at least for the IETF. I try to stay away from politics as much as possible, except on this matter. I like this.
superkuh 6y ago
Hard to take someone saying "the Internet is for End Users" seriously when they're working to implement QUIC, a purely corporate needs fulfilling step backwards for human people.
- luizfelberti 6y ago
  Hard to take someone saying what you're saying seriously, when this is given in such a crass and uninformative manner QUIC is a vastly superior transport to TCP in every technical regard. What exactly makes it a "purely corporate needs fulfilling step backwards for human people", if you don't mind adding some context to this extremely vague statement/opinion?
  - superkuh 6y ago
    QUIC is what happens when corporations define standards so their own services can be run cheaper. The transport layer shouldn't be 'aware' of what it is transporting. It shouldn't be a gigantic heap of things, even if those things in the heap sound nice (like encryption baked in). It is already impossible for anyone but Google (or another mega-corp) itself to make a browser that works with "modern" sites. This piles on to that. It is, despite the partial liberation from Google itself by the ietf, still a google attempt to control what HTTP and the web are. Google should not. Protocols should be generic. Layers should layers not just squashed all into one so youtube videos pull up faster on your mobile phone. There's more to the web, and the internet, than fixing mobile latency issues.
    - mongol 6y ago
      This sounds like a different variant of the "rampant layering violation" argument that was used against ZFS. It is sometimes healthy to challenge old assumptions. If QUIC turns out better than what we have in every respect that matters "for the end user", as this article is about, what would be the harm?
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I really don't get where this argument comes from QUIC is hosted protocol on top of UDP which content-neutral. There's no layering violation since all of QUIC sits at the application layer. And QUIC takes a generic content-neutral payload that you can build on top of. Building TLS into the protocol rather than having a plaintext protocol wrapped in a generic TLS stream isn't that weird -- it's how MySQL does it.
moonchild 6y ago
Recommend changing the link to the actual RFC, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html
- geofft 6y ago
  I think they're different - RFC 8890 is a particular position statement, and this blog post discusses why they decided they needed to publish it, some specific cases (e.g. the discussion about Parliament) that led up to it, and their decision-making process in general. RFC 8890 itself doesn't mention that, nor does it specifically mention things like DoH and China blocking it.
  - dTal 6y ago
    Additionally, the blog post links to the RFC, but not vice versa.
cryptica 6y ago
This RFC makes no mention of the root of the problem; the Federal Reserve system. In our fiat monetary system, all new money which enters the economy comes from banks as credit; companies then compete against each other to earn the biggest possible share of that newly printed credit. This means that new money doesn't originate from consumers (so-called end users), all new money originates from institutions... So why would companies care about end users (consumers) when all the new money they get actually comes from financial institutions??? Why not get money straight from the source; cater to the paymasters and use consumers as pawns? These days, it makes more financial sense to manipulate consumers to please financial institutions than to manipulate financial institutions to please consumers... The dynamics are out of whack. That's why we need UBI urgently - Make consumers the source of all new currency, this would force big companies to forget about cheap institutional money and focus on consumers. Let consumers be the paymasters of the economy. This game of allowing banks to decide who gets access to cheap credit and who doesn't is inevitably going to lead to the kind of corruption we've seen over the past decade.

306 points by pimterry 6y ago

xg15 6y ago

> Because of the global nature of the Internet, it wouldn’t be possible to pursue a bilateral or regional style of governance; decisions would have to be sanctioned by every government where the Internet operates. That’s difficult to achieve even for vague statements of shared goals; doing it for the details of network protocols is impractical. In all honesty, maybe that would be the better alternative, if the only other option is US tech companies deciding unilaterally for the whole internet.

bjo590 6y ago
US based tech companies are making those decisions for the whole internet because internet users are voting for US based tech companies' influence with their time, attention, and clicks. It's open and democratic.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Not really since most people don't know they even have a choice let alone that they are making one in any particular direction.

anilakar 6y ago

The IETF strives to create the best technical solution for given specifications. That's its task. Where those specifications come from is a related but separate issue.

guerrilla 6y ago
> ‘Best' doesn't mean the choice that has the most companies supporting it; it’s the one that has the best technical arguments behind it. > If the IETF were to only decide upon technical merit, how would it balance these interests? > Over the years, these questions have become increasingly urgent, because it isn’t viable to make decisions that have political outcomes but explain them using only technical arguments. The article explains that that is necessary but not sufficient. It goes on to argue this with examples and explicit justifications. It even has an entire section dedicated to explaining why having it your way would not work. I'm not sure where your comment is coming from though. Who are you to decide how they will do their work? It seems they have decided for themselves and it's in conflict with what you want. Then we don't know why you want this because you haven't provided any reason, reference to authority or any other clues. From my perspective, the IETF and their standards don't exist in a vacuum and their actions have consequences, sometimes of an ethical nature. They seem to agree. It seems prudent that they come to a consensus on what their ethics are, document them and try to abide by them. It's just a case of having a consistent and open policy on a matter which can't be avoided. That is, they will do right or wrong whether they document their intention or not since their actions sometimes have such ethical consequences. Why stick one's head in the sand?
ergl 6y ago
Seems like IETF's mission statement disagrees with you: > The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of resources. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935
- wyc 6y ago
  Also, the IETF has no formal membership roster or membership requirements, and all participants and managers are volunteers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jillesvangurp 6y ago

It's good to put a stake in the ground for the IETF to create clarity about what they do and why. Countries like China, the US, Australia, and the UK are of course interested in controlling the flow of information for political, ideological, military and other reasons. Therefore they are interested in controlling what the IETF does and how. That's the nature of any big country or entity (including companies). E.g. Apple kicking competitors out of the app store is exactly the same kind of behavior. Whether that's good or bad is a separate discussion. The reason the internet exists at all is that it provided a way around / relief from this level of control and that it allowed independent innovation to happen. In a way this was a happy accident because a lot of the funding for the R&D behind this came out of cold war era defense projects which were very much not about the free flow of information. So, it would be a stretch that this is working as intended. But it was successful exactly because of that and the IETF brought together the right parties to ensure it kept enabling this. More strict networks ultimately failed to compete because users and companies found that they needed to tap into this free flow of information. The fact that countries like China, Russia, North Korea, etc. are on the internet at all (grudgingly and with all the restrictions that they try to enforce) is because they need to be. They are also part of the world economy for the same reason. And as much as they'd like to tell others what the value of their own currencies should be relative to $, renminbi, euro, etc.; they have no choice but to leave that to market forces. Of course it doesn't stop them from trying to influence and manipulate that. Nor does it stop anyone else from doing so. But ultimately it leads to either hyper inflation or people just swallowing their pride and accepting or paying in dollars for stuff they buy (e.g. oil) or sell on the international market. The internet is the same; it's a take it or leave it kind of thing. Either you are on it or you are not. It is a bit of neutral ground where mutually hostile entities looking to control, monitor, and manipulate each other can conduct their business (some of it very bad business). It works precisely because things like https prevent man in the middle attacks, certificates keep us honest (to some extent). All the other technical tooling the IETF standardized to ensure third parties don't mess with private interactions between two parties trying to have some meaningful interaction is there for just that reason. Of course the tools are far from perfect and there's an arms race between intelligence agencies to exploit loop holes, bugs, design flaws, etc. The IETF's role is to address these issues, not to create more of them to enable authoritarian regimes to gain an edge over other nations or their own citizens. So, DNS over HTTPS is a good thing and exactly the right thing for the IETF to be standardizing because it fixes a problem with what they previously standardized (i.e. DNS). It's controversial because it takes away power from countries actively abusing that power. But the fact that others are exploiting protocol weaknesses in DNS is fundamentally a bug and not a feature. You could argue DNS over HTTPS is not a perfect solution or that better solutions exist but not that the role of the IETF is to enable the Chinese to have a say in what people (in or outside China) lookup via DNS. That's not their role. If the Chinese, the Australians, etc. want to block people that choose to configure their browsers to use this (or browsers that do this by default), that is of course their good right. But enabling that kind of self isolation is not a core IETF function.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

So if an end user tries to request a page from this site without using SNI, instead of an just an HTTP error code, they get this lovely little piece of snark: This Web site requires a more modern browser to operate securely; please upgrade your browser. The truth is it just requires SNI server_name in the ClientHello. I don't send SNI except on sites that require it. Not every site is on a shared IP; some still use dedicated IPs. So I am the end user reading HTTP headers. I always thought this addtional "message" from mnot.net was somewhat presumptive for an IETF person who claims to be some sort of user advocate. This is the kind of thing I usually see from web developers telling you to "upgrade" your browser or turn on Javascript for the best "user experience", not IETF folks. Maybe it's a default on some server software, not custom. His site does TLS1.3 but it doesn't do ESNI/ECH so I guess some browsers (or other clients) can be a little "too modern".

vertex-four 6y ago
In practice, I reckon you might be the only person in the world - or maybe one of a dozen - who has this problem. And in that context that's not snark at all, it's an accurate description of what is most likely the cause of the error.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  > an accurate description except it's a lie. SNI isn't "more secure", it leaks information to a possible MITM.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    So use ESNI.
  - mnot 6y ago
    It's actually a relic of when I was testing to see how broad SNI adoption was -- see https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_youre_sniing https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_yo...
  - 6y ago

tW4r 6y ago

I was really hoping this to use the same phraseology as technical RFCs including MUST, MAY, SHOULD, etc. For example: The task force MUST prioritize... the user MAY expect...

xg15 6y ago

> For example, the recent standardisation of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) pitted advocates for dissidents and protestors against network operators who use DNS for centralised network management, and child safety advocates who promote DNS-based filtering solutions. If the IETF were to only decide upon technical merit, how would it balance these interests? I neither like DoH nor in general arguments of the form "X is not political, we only decide on merits". However, in this case, I really wonder if the IETF's contribution is political: DoH on it's own is highly so, but to my understanding, the politics are in the decision to design an encrypted, centralized and block-proof alternative to DNS with preselected servers and automatically deploy it to millions of users. But those points belong the initial requirements and the deployment process - not so much the technical details of implementation. That DoH is a standard makes some difference, but not very much. I think we'd have roughly the same problems (though maybe with less publicity and discussion) if this was some properietary Chrome thing that was fully developed inside Google. Or to put it differently, assuming it was already decided that something like DoH should be built, is there still political power in the follow-up discussions about how it should be built?

ignoramous 6y ago
> ...and child safety advocates who promote DNS-based filtering solutions. DoH doesn't prevent filtering. Sure, it doesn't respect OS or Network-enforced settings, but that's kind of the whole point of its existence. > ...DNS for centralised network management. DoT (and DNSCrypt?) would arguably be the better alternatives in these cases. So, use-cases are absolutely being addressed in DNS' case at the very least. > I really wonder if the IETF's contribution is political: DoH on it's own is highly so... I think DoH and ESNI are exactly the kind of response expected from a tech firm like Mozilla: Fight for its users and invest in the right technology that helps keep the Internet global despite the many efforts to dismantle it, not just by governments but by big tech in equal measure. In fact it is big tech that sells "cyber security" solutions to these governments in the first place: A trillion dollar market opportunity [0]. Look no further than ITU to see how anti-user, pro-corporate, pro-government politically-influenced technology standards can be [1]. Things might take a steep dive given Google's [2] and Facebook's [3] recent inroads in the Communications industry. This pro-user political engagement from Mozilla et al is more than welcome, in my opinion. [0] https://foundationcapital.com/cybersecurity-the-next-trillion-dollar-market/ https://foundationcapital.com/cybersecurity-the-next-trillio... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416269 [2] https://www.opennetworking.org/ https://www.opennetworking.org/ [3] https://telecominfraproject.com/ https://telecominfraproject.com/

luord 6y ago

Seems like an attempt of making "fight for the users"—which should be everyone's rule zero—textual, at least for the IETF. I try to stay away from politics as much as possible, except on this matter. I like this.

superkuh 6y ago

Hard to take someone saying "the Internet is for End Users" seriously when they're working to implement QUIC, a purely corporate needs fulfilling step backwards for human people.

luizfelberti 6y ago
Hard to take someone saying what you're saying seriously, when this is given in such a crass and uninformative manner QUIC is a vastly superior transport to TCP in every technical regard. What exactly makes it a "purely corporate needs fulfilling step backwards for human people", if you don't mind adding some context to this extremely vague statement/opinion?
- superkuh 6y ago
  QUIC is what happens when corporations define standards so their own services can be run cheaper. The transport layer shouldn't be 'aware' of what it is transporting. It shouldn't be a gigantic heap of things, even if those things in the heap sound nice (like encryption baked in). It is already impossible for anyone but Google (or another mega-corp) itself to make a browser that works with "modern" sites. This piles on to that. It is, despite the partial liberation from Google itself by the ietf, still a google attempt to control what HTTP and the web are. Google should not. Protocols should be generic. Layers should layers not just squashed all into one so youtube videos pull up faster on your mobile phone. There's more to the web, and the internet, than fixing mobile latency issues.
  - mongol 6y ago
    This sounds like a different variant of the "rampant layering violation" argument that was used against ZFS. It is sometimes healthy to challenge old assumptions. If QUIC turns out better than what we have in every respect that matters "for the end user", as this article is about, what would be the harm?
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I really don't get where this argument comes from QUIC is hosted protocol on top of UDP which content-neutral. There's no layering violation since all of QUIC sits at the application layer. And QUIC takes a generic content-neutral payload that you can build on top of. Building TLS into the protocol rather than having a plaintext protocol wrapped in a generic TLS stream isn't that weird -- it's how MySQL does it.

moonchild 6y ago

Recommend changing the link to the actual RFC, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html

geofft 6y ago
I think they're different - RFC 8890 is a particular position statement, and this blog post discusses why they decided they needed to publish it, some specific cases (e.g. the discussion about Parliament) that led up to it, and their decision-making process in general. RFC 8890 itself doesn't mention that, nor does it specifically mention things like DoH and China blocking it.
- dTal 6y ago
  Additionally, the blog post links to the RFC, but not vice versa.

cryptica 6y ago

This RFC makes no mention of the root of the problem; the Federal Reserve system. In our fiat monetary system, all new money which enters the economy comes from banks as credit; companies then compete against each other to earn the biggest possible share of that newly printed credit. This means that new money doesn't originate from consumers (so-called end users), all new money originates from institutions... So why would companies care about end users (consumers) when all the new money they get actually comes from financial institutions??? Why not get money straight from the source; cater to the paymasters and use consumers as pawns? These days, it makes more financial sense to manipulate consumers to please financial institutions than to manipulate financial institutions to please consumers... The dynamics are out of whack. That's why we need UBI urgently - Make consumers the source of all new currency, this would force big companies to forget about cheap institutional money and focus on consumers. Let consumers be the paymasters of the economy. This game of allowing banks to decide who gets access to cheap credit and who doesn't is inevitably going to lead to the kind of corruption we've seen over the past decade.