Re: [Gendispatch] New Version Notification for draft-thomson-gendispatch-rfc-derivatives-00.txt

On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 12:44 AM Eliot Lear <lear@lear.ch> wrote:

>
> On 29.09.23 09:23, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>
> Yes, there are powers in the world other than the IAB and IESG (thankfully). They are often used wisely; sometimes, they are not. Interestingly, none of them can yet affect the _entire_ Internet.
>
> Except that is precisely where we are heading because physics doesn't obey
> man-made jurisdictions.  How do I know which fork to apply?  So we end up
> selling specific code into jurisdictions?  It's been done before, but it's
> never good for interoperability.  And it begins to look like the fiasco
> that spectrum management is today.  Is that what we want?  Oh, and I
> promise you that no small player will be able to play at the global level.
> Bye bye Firefox and Thunderbird.
>
Well, I'm no longer at Mozilla, but seeing as you mention Firefox, I can
tell you that when I was this scenario wasn't anywhere near the top of my
concerns around European regulation. Rather, it was ill-advised
requirements in the name of security (e.g. QWACs). In fact, while I had
concerns about CRA, it was not about standards forking but rather about the
security disclosure and process requirements (
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/07/13/european-parliaments-version-of-the-cra-threatens-cybersecurity-and-open-source-development/
).

> If another jurisdiction replicates Europe's model and then diverges,  we
> have can end up in one of two scenarios- one bad and the other worse:
>
>    - Bad: different code points, but a local requirement to use a
>    particular standard; meaning no common algorithm selection.
>    - Worse: same code point but different meaning.
>
> We can and have seriously limited both of these threats through our
> copyrights.  If we give up on that we are asking for chaos.
>
I don't find this at all persuasive. ETSI is perfectly capable of writing
their own versions of specifications when they choose to, or, alternately
providing diffs against ours (again, see QWACs), and with any code points
they choose. If the only thing preventing this is copyright, then that's
not going to do much

-Ekr

Eliot
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