Re: [hrpc] draft-tenoever-hrpc-association-00

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 06:08:39PM +0100,
 Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 70 lines which said:

> Please have a look at this -00 draft on Freedom of Association and
> Internet Protocols which I hope we can discuss at the hrpc session
> in Chicago.

Unfortunately, there was no time to discuss it (see my rant on the use
of meeting time). So, here are my remarks on -00:

* the draft says "This document aims to document forms of protest" but
contains little about protests. It is a very difficult issue and I
don't have an immediate answer but it is certainly something to
address. What is the Internet equivalent of a protest in the streets?
We all (I think) agress that dDoS are NOT this equivalent, and are
something to fight. But then what?  "Blackening" Web sites is a "pull
protest", where you give a message to people who came to search
one. What is possible for a "push protest"?  [Note that it is related
to the problem of the lack of a public space - think streets and
market places - on the Internet.]

* "it also makes it legally and technically very difficult to
communite a message to someone who did not explicitly ask for this"
There is here a difference between the Internet and the meat space. In
the meat space, it is acceptable to "push" messages to people "who did
not explicitly ask for this" because it doesn't scale: Jehovah's
witnesses can bang on your door, to talk about Jesus and it is most of
the time regarded as acceptable (even if annoying) precisely because
it doesn't scale. One Jehovah's witness cannot bang on one million
doors at the same time. So, there is little risk that this freedom to
push messages will be abused. On the Internet, it is the opposite. The
example given in the draft ("a message was distributed to the server
logs of millons of servers through the 'masscan'-tool") is spam, pure
and simple. One person can do it, with very limited resources. If it
were regarded as acceptable, logs would become unusable.

* I think this is a very important issue, when discussing Internet
vs. meatspace. In the meatspace, when you protest, when you push
messages, you commit resources: your time and sometimes, depending
on the country, your physical security. It has two consequences:
protests have meaning (one million people in the street mean
something, politically, while one million bots mean nothing), and the
risk of abuse is limited (you cannot have a one-million-people
demonstration blocking the city center twice a day).

* "a concept that is regularly discussed on the application level,
called 'filter bubble'" I think this concept is seriously exaggerated,
often in anti-Internet propaganda. Before the Internet, people were
already reading only books and newspapers they agree with, only
talking with similar-minded friends, etc. It has nothing new.

* a pre-draft circulated with interesting examples of peer-production
systems, decision-making platforms. These examples are not in -00.  Is
it because it was applications, not infrastructure?