A Practice for Revoking Posting Rights to IETF Mailing Lists

All self-governing bodies have ways of managing the scope of participant interaction. The IETF uses a consensus-driven process for developing computer-communications standards in an open fashion. An important part of this consensus-driven process is the pervasive use of mailing lists for discussion. Notably, in a small number of cases, a participant has engaged in a "denial-of-service" attack to disrupt the consensus-driven process. Regrettably, as these bad faith attacks become more common, the IETF needs to establish a practice that reduces or eliminates these attacks. This memo recommends such a practice for use by the IETF.