Re: [Gendispatch] IETF transparency and diversity

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

To clarify, my concerns are not so much for direct IETF legal liability as
the risk of IETF work becoming one of the battle grounds in the
coming storm.

Until the pandemic, there was bipartisan interest in addressing 'the issue'
of 'big tech' in both the EU and US. 14 months later, Big Tech has only
gotten even bigger and more concentrated. I rather doubt the issue has been
forgotten by these people.

All I am really saying is don't say anything in a WG meeting that you would
not want repeated in front of a House Hearing.

Most folk who participate in IETF are not authorized to speak on behalf of
their company. I was the rare exception in that I was an official press
contact for VeriSign which since it was a public company at the time meant
I had to be aware of all sorts of legal requirements some of which had
serious consequences for saying the wrong thing. It would be well for a lot
of folk to bear in mind that the polite fiction we do not speak for our
employers is going to be roughly as effective as a firewall is in stopping
Internet breaches - it's not nothing but it isn't going to stop bullets or
congressional subpoenas.



On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 7:42 PM Jay Daley <[e-mail]> wrote:

> (Apologies for continuing the increasingly off-topic conversation but I
> need to respond to some points here)
>
> Tony,
>
> On 10/04/2021, at 7:56 AM, Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> It was good to see a recognition that the IETF has a potentially
> significant antitrust exposure and willingness to increase the transparency
> mechanisms as a first step.
>
>
> I clearly read Mark's message very differently from you.
>
> The exposure here is not new.  The first major independent analysis of the
> topic occurred in 1994 by an external lawfirm.  I know, because I signed
> the check, and then signed for the liability insurance.  Over the years and
> especially during the past decade, almost all significant standards bodies
> individually and collectively have engaged in activities to diminish the
> exposure and develop related sets of organisational practices.
>
>
> The following two sentences are a significant misrepresentation of the
> true state of affairs.
>
> The IETF has been largely a non-participant outlier, ignoring the
> problems; although the relatively recent formation of the LLC and work of
> legal counsel have made some improvements.
>
> The IETF has long been "easy pickings" for antitrust behaviors because of
> the lack of transparency and other organisational practices which enable
> the adoption of a IETF standards that enable a company to acquire
> significant market share for a product or service.
>
>
> For a correct picture please see
> https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-llc-statement-competition-law-issues/
>
> The tl;dr is that the following characteristics of the IETF put us in a
> very strong position, quite different from many other organisations:
>
> * IETF participation is free and open to all interested individuals.
> * Participants engage in their individual capacity, not as company
> representatives.
> * A wide range of perspectives is represented, reflecting interests from
> multiple industry sectors, academia, government and non-governmental
> organizations (NGOs), from around the globe.
> * IETF procedural rules, which include robust appeal options, are
> well-documented in public materials, and rigorously followed.
> * IETF activities are conducted with extreme transparency, in public
> forums.
> * Decision-making requires achieving broad consensus via these public
> processes.
> * IETF’s disclosure-focused intellectual property rights policies
> carefully and transparently balance the interests of standards contributors
> and standards adopters.
> * Fundamentally, “IETF participants use their best engineering judgment to
> find the best solution for the whole Internet, not just the best solution
> for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.”[RFC 7154]
>
> This is not to say that more could be done, and it is true that in some
> cases there has been resistance to simple improvements, but that should not
> be confused with the overall position.
>
> Jay
>
> I believe there was testimony in recent litigation that an IETF
> specification was worth about $4 million.  Continuing participation in the
> IETF is very costly and the number of participants attributed to a few
> specific companies or (as noted by Phil H-B, unattributed operatives) at
> meetings is a testament to beneficiaries.
>
> The observation that the IETF's problems today extend well beyond
> anticompetitive behavior seems spot on.  The participant and work item
> metrics show that major contemporary specification development and
> engagement today have shifted rather massively to venues like 3GPP.  The
> IETF remains stagnant.  Large numbers of academics flow in and out to mine
> ideas and advance their academic studies.  Few companies want to pursue
> anything there anymore except for a comparative handful trying to leverage
> a few more years and dollars out of legacy technologies.
>
> The tendencies in the IETF to be abusive and intolerant - especially to
> people who are apostates - has unfortunately been standard practice in the
> IETF in the past few decades.  If you reject the religious mandates of the
> IETF, you are declared "off topic," or fail to get a group started, or told
> to go elsewhere - often in abusive ways.  The intolerant behavior is
> especially difficult for those in many non-Western cultures.  These are the
> bigger problems of the IETF.
>
> All organisations are largely incapable of analysing themselves and
> understanding their strengths and weakness in the larger ecosystem.  The
> tendency is to reject criticism - even when it is essential.  It seems
> worth not only maintaining a generic discourse list, but to encourage
> dissident and critical participation without dismissing commentarity as
> rhetorical and pile-on behavior.  Occasional good humour would also help.
>
> best,
> tony r (working as an agnostic analyst who admittedly preferred the IETF
> circa 1970-1992)
>
>
> On 08-Apr-21 1:02 AM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>
> So all of the above suggest that maintaining a generic IETF discourse list
> is probably a good thing.  --tony r
> That is a *huge* leap  -- can you show us your workings?
>
>
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> IETF Executive Director
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