Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-04.txt

[Gurshabad Grover <[e-mail]>]

On 17/09/19 5:52 PM, [e-mail] wrote:
> 
> I too am looking for RG guidance.
> 


Hello.

Some thoughts on the research question and the conclusion in the draft:

Andrew Sullivan's comments from a while ago [fn0] ring true to me. I
actually think there are three questions the draft is trying to comment on:

(1) Do networking standards have political use and/or impact?
(2) Is there politics in the development of networking standards?
(3) "Are protocols political?"

The conclusion (and abstract) say that (1) and (2) are undisputed: "it
is undisputed that standards and protocols are both products of a
political process, and they can also be used for political means." I
think it would be useful to clarify how this is arrived at: is this
statement relying on the views summarised in Section 4, i.e. through
participant observation, discussions and interviews? Because to me, all
subsections of Section 4 do not seem to be answering all the three
questions. (See [fn1] for how I'm reading each subsection in Section 4,
please correct me if I'm wrong).

While the draft says that it does not aim to check participants' views
for consistency, I still think the addition of text to this effect is
important because this claim is relied upon in the conclusion to answer
(3), i.e. the research question, in the affirmative. This seems to be
suggesting that if (1) and (2) are true, then (3) is true. Is this a
correct interpretation?

Quick summary of my suggestions:
* explicitly add what specific question out of the three was
discussed/asked in Section 4;
* clarify whether Section 4 is being used to arrive at the conclusion;
* clarify the link between the three questions

Thank you.
-Gurshabad

[fn0] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/hrpc/FjPucFoWPCaVzNbYOycp3TH1Z4I

[fn1] For each claim, I interpret the answers in sub-sections of Section
4 to be:
* 4.1: (1) True; 	(2) Unclear; 	(3) False
* 4.2: (1) Unclear; 	(2) Unclear; 	(3) Sometimes true
* 4.3: (1) True; 	(2) Unclear; 	(3) Unclear
* 4.4: (1) True; 	(2) Unclear;	(3) Maybe true?
* 4.5: (1) True; 	(2) True; 	(3) True