Re: [Gendispatch] I-D Action: draft-hoffmann-gendispatch-policy-stakeholders-03.txt

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 13-Jan-24 09:55, Salz, Rich wrote:
>> Protocols developed by the IETF (and research activities prior to the IETF) have always had policy and societal impart. Nothing new here.
> 
> I find that attitude incredibly naïve. If you haven't noticed that regulators are more "interested" now then in the past 30 years, please see sentence one.  Remember when the NSFNet had an AUP that kept std.com off the Internet?

But that's not what the text in the draft says. It doesn't say that policy wonks or regulators are more interested than they used to be. It says:

"Increasingly, the decisions	
we take when developing Internet standards are also policy decisions	
with trade-offs and implications that are inherently social rather	
than purely technical."

It would be more accurate to say:

Increasingly, policy makers are now aware that the decisions	
we take when developing Internet standards are also policy decisions	
with trade-offs and implications that are inherently social rather	
than purely technical.

They were certainly oblivious to this when I first encountered policy people in Brussels in ~1985, and even in ~1995 the only "policy" issue I heard about was the tedious matter of TLD management**. That was also when I first encountered the word "stakeholders". (AUP issues were certainly discussed earlier, but that was essentially a budgetary issue even when the word "policy" was used.) There was a step function in "policy" discussion after ~2003 due to WSIS.

Note, I am not at all against welcoming policy people to participate in the IETF. Just don't suggest that our technical choices haven't had societal impact since forever.

** Discussion of cryptography policy aside. That's always been there.

    Brian


> 
> Saying "we knew back then that things like this would happen" just lack all credibility with me.  If you can prove it, I'll apologize to anyone I offended.
> 
>