Re: [hrpc] The HRPC RG has placed draft-tenoever-hrpc-political in state "Candidate RG Document"

[Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]>]

Hi Avri,

My apologies for my smarmy and uninformed remark.  Trumpism engenders
bad behavior.

In thinking about this document and ways to make it more useful while
biking over the past few hours, the following ideas came to mind.

1. Define basic terms, especially "internetwork" and "internetwork protocol"

2. Determine the scope of venues treated  Consider how the larger
ecosystem of internetwork standards body and how the IETF altered and
influences the politics across the ecosystem.  The attached diagram is
from the ETSI cybersecurity ecosystem reference guide, but helps provide
a starting point for the larger ecosystem.  What would one with the IETF
at the center look like?

3. Determine the purpose.  Here you might consider shifting from
"standards and politics" - which is foregone - to something like "a
framework for analyzing and applying political values to standards
making" or pick your own equivalent.  This would provide continuing
value beyond just a research paper.

4. Improve the historical facts and citations.  Cite to authoritative
source documents wherever possible. One thought is to focus on how the
IETF and its precursors changed at fundamental inflection points: 1969 -
1986 (entirely DOD, closed); 1986-1995 (DOD+NSF, closed); 1995-present
(industry+, open).

5. Consider the relationships between the organizational construct and
politics.  The IETF is one of the few "non-legal," completely open
standards bodies, and relies instead on liability insurance for decision
makers and lightweight IPR ownership provided by the IETF Trust.  Almost
all other bodies require up-front membership costs with a constrained
constituency and the body assumes IPR ownership and assumes liability
exposure.  How do those fundamental features affect the politics - both
positive and negative.

6. Consider the relationships between standards availability and
politics.  The IETF was the original pioneer and grand disrupting
force.  It has been perhaps the most significant "political"
consideration over recent decades - with many arguing that it is
fundamentally unjust to require conformance to an internetworking
standard and then charging money to see it.  Carl Malamud has long been
the revolutionary pioneer here on multiple levels.   See
https://public.resource.org/eti/eti-hardcover.pdf   See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Malamud                                                       


Hope this helps.  -t

On 20-Aug-18 12:58 PM, [e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The decision to make it a RG document instead of an individual document
> means that the discussion now is within the RG based on this base
> document.  There was an initial decision to make it a RG document at the
> meeting during IETF102, and while people have discussed its content in
> the last month, unless I missed it, no one argued that it should not
> become a RG document.  As I understand it, this does not mean is it
> ready for publication and is no guarantee of publication.  It just means
> that now the RG is responsible for its change control based on group
> discussions and rough consensus and that the authors are now editors
> responding to the group.
>
> thanks
>
> avri
>
>