Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-05.txt

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

On 9/21/19 3:32 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>    Whereas there might not be agreement among the Internet protocol
>    community on the specific political nature of the technological
>    development process and its outputs, it is generally agreed that
>    standards and protocols are both products of a political process, and
>    they can also be used for political means.
>    
> I would like to register my agrement with Andrew and focus in on this
> one point: there are many protocols (in fact, by count probably most
> protocols) which are just designed by proprietary organizations.  It's
> not clear on what basis you are claiming that they are the output of
> political processes and this certainly doesn't seem like something
> that's generally agreed.

Aren't proprietary standards, and the way they make it possible and impossible to do certain things, a prime example of a political process and political impact? 

> I certainly agree that they "can be used"
> for political means, though any "can" statement is pretty weak.
> 

If we can document *that*, we would have made a lot of progress in the IETF imho.

> This is even true at some level for many standards, especially
> because your definition of "standard" is so expansive:
> 
>    Standards  'A standard is an agreed-upon way of doing something or
>       measuring something.'  [Sisson]
> 
> By this definition I think it would be pretty hard to argue that
> SSLv2,  and SSLv3 weren't standards given their wide use, even
> though they were just designed by people at one company. 

I don't see how that definition would make that impossible. 

> Another
> example would be the Philips screwdriver head. What's the political
> process that produced these?
> 
> 

The patenting of process by Henry F. Philips, the regimes under which is was patented, its competition with other screw heads (torx, etc). There is an enormous amount of politics, and societal ordering connected with screws.

Maybe this text by Bruno Latour might help further illustrate that:

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/46-TECHNOLOGY-DURABLE-GBpdf.pdf


> More generally, it seems like depending on how one interprets the
> major claims in this document, they are either too strong (all
> protocol and standards development is political)

Why is that too strong?

> or trivial (some
> protocol and standards development is political). The first is too
> strong for the reasons I indicate above,

I don't think so, but I am happy to discuss.

and the second seems pretty
> obvious and doesn't really need much theorizing;

As said, I think it would be very useful if we would document this, so we don't need to repeat the discussion.

> one needs just point
> to the development of some protocol which was a political process, and
> it seems like that's been pretty amply documented for a number of
> protocols/standards (e.g., HTTP/2 or TLS 1.0).
> 
> As I noted above, the claim that protocols can be used for political
> means also seems relatively obvious (cf. Tor).

I am happy to conclude that we agree on the two statements:

- some protocol and standards development is political

and

- protocols can be used for political means

That's progress for me in this discussion. Now let's see if we can further flesh out:

- all protocol and standards development is political

Best,

Niels





> 
> In short, I don't think this document should be published as an RFC
> without major revision, which would presumably start with fleshing
> out some more interesting claims.
> 
> -Ekr
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 11:40 AM Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     Apparently I haven't taken my OCD medications, and therefore I'm
>     looking at this and responding.  I mostly looked at diffs between -04
>     and -06.  Still speaking just for me.
> 
>     On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 05:27:53PM +0200, Niels ten Oever wrote:
>     > I am curious to hear whether you think these adaptations help address some of your issues.
>     >
>     > Suggestion, comments, discussion, and pull requests are always welcome:
> 
>     In §1, I do not find economic impacts described in RFC 613.  I find
>     RFC 3271 to be a bizarre reference, and very hard to justify given the
>     way cited here.  I am totally mystified about how RFC 101 illustrates
>     early community members making political decisions.  I'm having a hard
>     time hooking up most of these other RFCs with this claim, too, and I
>     wonder if it isn't the same question-begging I've raised before: just
>     because a thing has somehow been the implication of a political
>     process does not actually show that the thing is _itself_ political.
>     If the entire approach is simply to take BramanII thesis as proven,
>     then state that and get rid of all the other supposed support here,
>     which is inadequate to prove the point and is obscure enough that the
>     reader needs to do the work of chasing the references anyway.
> 
>     The reliance on the definition of Internet Standards in §2 is going to
>     yield a rather underwhelming conclusion, since an awful lot of the
>     Internet runs on stuff that isn't Internet Standard.  This includes
>     HTTP 1.0, 1.1, and 2, so it's not like it's a little gap.
> 
>     In §5, the claim of "general agreement" is empirical and has nowhere
>     been demonstrated that I can see.  And this discussion is _prima
>     facie_ evidence against the claim.
> 
>     In §6, again things that are presented as "conclusions" are really
>     just positions that are not actually argued for in the text.  This
>     conclusion basically says that if you accept Russell, then the
>     use-context counts.  But unstated here is the acceptance that Russell
>     is right and also that therefore the use-context counts.  That's
>     literally what's at stake in the discussion, and the I-D has not
>     proven any of this at all.  The entire section continues to beg the
>     question.  Either make an argument somewhere for this conclusion, or
>     just take it out.
> 
>     I'm unlikely to have another train ride soon where I get to look at
>     this again, so please don't take my future silence as agreement (or
>     disagreement).  It's just silence.
> 
>     Best regards,
> 
>     A
> 
>     -- 
>     Andrew Sullivan
>     [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>
> 
>     _______________________________________________
>     hrpc mailing list
>     [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>
>     https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> hrpc mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc
> 

-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
DATACTIVE Research Group
University of Amsterdam

PGP fingerprint	   2458 0B70 5C4A FD8A 9488  
                   643A 0ED8 3F3A 468A C8B3