Re: [hrpc] "Paul Vixie and Peter Lowe on Why DoH is Politically Motivated"

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 15/11/2021 13:53 Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> 
> I don't think it's that useful to argue about the bigger picture, *but* I also think that the attribution of this to DoH is rather misplaced. There are a number of reasons--primarily technical--that Firefox at least elected to use DoH, but we could have just as well used DoT and the situation would be very much the same.
> 
Not really - DoT is a protocol designed to operate in the clear and to be easily detected and controlled, while DoH was designed with the explicit objective of masquerading the traffic within other HTTPS exchanges and make it impossible to block or even detect the communication. This is, indeed, a political choice and a political stance.

However, "political" is not a bad word. The pretense that code and protocols are "just technical stuff" has been wiped away since "Code Is Law" times, and many things we do, as citizens and even more as companies, have socio-economic consequences and thus are political. It's better to recognize this than to pretend otherwise.

The problem IMHO is that the IETF is taking political stances without any kind of proper political analysis or understanding. Especially when public policy and governments come into play, and with no offense meant to anyone, the debate at the IETF seems often out of touch with the reality.

Governments are commonly depicted in caricatural forms, only interested in enslaving their population and controlling their minds through censorship, which includes any form of content scrutiny (even the voluntary ones) and which should be countered by ensuring unfettered, uncontrollable, anonymous, encrypted circulation of anything, legal or not.

The objective problems that this circulation has created - democracies being endangered through unaccountable political propaganda, people dying for believing in antivax rubbish generously spread by social algorithms because it generates clicks, or the marginalization of the less technical user groups because phishing and cheating and security issues become so ubiquitous that it's impossible for them to cope, and there would be many more - are just dismissed. Issues around sovereignty, the tension between a global network and huge national differences in laws and values, are all handwaved away in a second as "Internet fragmentation". People that try to foster a more nuanced conversation are immediately attacked as wannabe dictators or motivated by their own sketchy business objectives. It is very frustrating.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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