Re: [hrpc] Censorship

[Bill Woodcock <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 11, 2022, at 1:00 PM, Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:
> The reason I believe that this RG is an appropriate venue to discuss your communique is that each of the assertions you and others make seem to me closer to research questions.

Thank you.  If we stray outside the range of what you consider appropriate, please say so.

> My own view is that if the Internet community could effectively contribute to forcing Russia out of Ukraine, we have a moral obligation to do so.  However, I don't believe we can effectively contribute to that goal at the governance level, and maybe not at any other level.

Well, I think the question isn’t an absolute one… the question isn’t whether the Internet community can force Russia out of Ukraine.  The question is whether the Internet community can effect sanctions that act appropriately and effectively as sanctions in the general case where sanctions are being applied.  My suspicion is that the Internet community will be considerably more conservative about the application of sanctions than individual governments are.  But in cases of humanitarian crisis, the Internet community may also be quicker to act, or more willing to act on things that governments are hesitant to, lest they disrupt their westphalianism and open themselves to criticism as well.

So, not “can we stop Russia” but “can we place some of the societally-shared costs of Russia’s military connectivity back in their laps, and in the laps of those who are profiting from selling them services?”  Sanctions aren’t absolute, they build friction, a little at a time.

> Your assertions are:
> 
> 
>> 	• ● Disconnecting the population of a country from the Internet is a disproportionate and inappropriate sanction, since it hampers their access to the very information that might lead them to withdraw support for acts of war and leaves them with access to only the information their own government chooses to furnish.
> 
> This is indeed the theory.  Nothing like a live experiment to test it.  Anyone collecting data?

John Kristoff is leading the team that’s instrumenting the technical effects of this particular mechanism.  But that’s a technical measurement, not a geopolitical/economic/societal measurement.  Those are more difficult to do in concrete terms, and I’m _way_ out of my depth there.  One of my weaknesses is that I often suspect most everybody else is as well, at least in quantitative terms.

>> 	• ●  The effectiveness of sanctions should be evaluated relative to predefined goals. Ineffective sanctions waste effort and willpower and convey neither unity nor conviction.
> 
> There's a lot of devil hidden in the detail of "predefined goals", and there is a body of research around this.

There was a lot of text about governments having hundreds or thousands of years of experience in enacting sanctions, and the Internet community just coming in now, and acknowledging that we have much to learn.  I don’t remember offhand how much of that is on the cutting-room floor.

> Also, it doesn't follow that ineffective sanctions fail to convey unity or conviction.  If the goal is to get Russia out of Ukraine and they don't leave, does that mean that the west has failed to convey conviction?

Effectiveness doesn’t need to be measured by results, it can be measured by conviction and intent.  This is the difference between “hopes and prayers” and action.  Action may fail, but it’s not “hopes and prayers” bullshit.

>> 	• ●  Sanctions should be focused and precise. They should minimize the chance of unintended consequences or collateral damage. Disproportionate or over-broad sanctions risk fundamentally alienating populations.
> 
> Again, there is a body of research around this.

Yet it is not guiding the _current_ situation, so we hope to move in the direction of more precision and less collateral damage.

>> 	• ●  Military and propaganda agencies and their information infrastructure are potential targets of sanctions.
> 
> Is this meant to be an exclusive list?

Remember, this is a starting-point for a conversation, not an end-point.  With 87 authors, there was a bell-curve of thinking, which the letter tries to capture.  Everyone agreed on “military and propaganda.”  There was somewhat less agreement about “dual-use” and I think that was excised entirely from the final letter.  At the other end of the spectrum, everyone agreed that civilians should never be directly targeted by Internet sanctions, and civilian connectivity should never be impeded by sanction actions.  Also, government agencies which provide civil and social services shouldn’t be targeted.  There’s a fair bit of room in-between, and an acknowledgement that sanctioned parties may well attempt to use “human shields,” and to the degree that that brings about unintended harm on civilians, that’s on the sanctioned party, not on the sanctioning party.  But I think that’s a finer level of detail than made it out in the final letter, for length reasons rather than disagreement reasons.

>> 	• ●  The Internet, due to its transnational nature and consensus-driven multistakeholder system of governance, currently does not easily lend itself to the imposition of sanctions in national conflicts.
> 
> I have my own view as to why this is true.  But it may be worth elaborating in detail.

Perhaps.  Or we can each recognize what truth we see in this, for our own reasons, and move on to the actual work.  More debate yields better outcomes, at substantially higher costs in slowness and friction and so forth.  I don’t think that’s necessarily a weakness to be addressed; just a feature of multistakeholderism.  To the degree that we can get the full benefit of it, rather than thinking of it as a weakness, I’m happy.

>> 	• ●  It is inappropriate and counterproductive for governments to attempt to compel Internet governance mechanisms to impose sanctions outside of the community’s multistakeholder decision-making process.
> 
> Yeah, this requires a discussion of supremecy and subservience.  Who is supreme and why and where are the guns to back that up?

Guns aren’t the only mechanisms of power.  Money, people, etc.  Which is more powerful, Trinidad & Tobago, because they can issue laws and decrees, or NTT, because they can carry traffic around the world?  Apples and oranges, not a simple comparison.  And there are positive and negative forms of power.  Power demonstrated through denying things to people is negative.  Power demonstrated through creation and generosity is positive.  My open-source, potlatch-economy stripes are showing.  I’ll shut up now.

>> 	• ●  There are nonetheless appropriate, effective, and specific sanctions the Internet governance community may wish to consider in its deliberative processes.

“... after due process and consensus would publish sanctioned IP addresses and domain names in the form of public data feeds in standard forms (BGP and RPZ), to be consumed by any organization that chooses to subscribe to the principles and their outcome.”

Are you asking me to prognosticate on what specific networks or domain names, or categories of networks or domain names, future groups of stakeholders, might choose to include in those feeds?  I can guess that Russian military and propaganda agencies might be included if implementation goes fast enough, but beyond that, I don’t think it’s useful for me to speculate.

And before anyone goes off on the “well it’s irresponsible to build something if you can’t guarantee the outcome of every future decision ever” rant, nothing new is being built here. The mechanisms are all the same as are fully mature for other purposes.  The point here is to make it possible to use those mechanisms to enact sanctions more narrowly, with less humanitarian consequences, than is currently being done.

                                -Bill