Re: [arch-d] [EXT] Re: IAB Technical Discussion on Fragmentation: 2023-05-03

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 06/05/2023 01:10 CEST Watson Ladd <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> I seem to remember two WGs facing hostility due to policy and values
> issues: ohai and privacypass, and then the W3C has had its own issues
> with the Privacy Sandbox. So I don't think we can ignore these
> supratechnical issues entirely if participants are saying we should or
> shouldn't charter based on them. Also, ODoH, etc.

There is a difference between considering these issues and making decisions on the proper policy compromise between multiple conflicting interests, values and views. If your technical choices define the policy compromise, then it should be done with the involvement of all affected stakeholders, and not just by the technical community.

The original idea was that we would have places where we would talk and reach rough consensus around policy compromises, such as the IGF, and then the technical community would follow. However, "the technical community never accepted to consider anyone else's views and in most cases only showed up in those venues to say that engineers know best and that the decisions they made in the 1970s were still the best possible ones" (sorry for this summary, but this is how things were described to me by a government officer some time ago).

> The fact that the Internet is permissionless and implementation
> precedes standardization is good: it creates a dynamic environment
> that has tremendously benefited everyone involved, and has prevented
> rent-seekers who would like to stop investing and innovating and
> instead charge tolls. 

You must be stuck in time at least 15 years ago. Today, the most common device for accessing the Internet is a smartphone, on which you can only pick between two operating systems. Each of their owners controls everyone else's access to offering services: you cannot distribute an app without their permission and without abiding by their unilateral requirements, and often without conceding them small perks (rents) like a 30% commission on any payment. And this is just an example: the cloud infrastructure market, as another example, is increasingly like that, with 3-4 dominant operators (mostly the same as above) progressively conquering all others.
 
As happened before in other industries, the lack of regulation and the consolidation that follows innovation fostered mono/oligopolies, and now we need a bit of permissions and planning to rein them back and restore choice and competition. This will inevitably make the Internet less uniform, less global and less borderless, but it's a price that we need to pay.

-- 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy