Re: [hrpc] new title for draft-tenoever-hrpc-political

[Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]>]

Hi there,

Technology, protocols, and standards are almost never neutral.  Nor are
the venues used to pursue them.  They are almost always carefully chosen
to meet institutional or personal strategic objectives, biases, or
proclivities.  Even at layer 1 - the physical interface has been
profoundly "political."  Indeed, the very structure that is used to
differentiate protocol layers is political.   It is what motivates the
actors to choose different courses of action.

As suggested before, it is useful to "take the red pill" (using "The
Matrix" terminology) and watch Evegny Morozov's lecture at
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1yJ8eeI2js>  [There is a certain irony
here as for some years during the 1980s - to deal with the challenge of
all the internets which existed - the term "Matrix" was popularized by
John Quarterman  to describe the ensemble. ]

Over the years, countless reports, groups, conference, and papers have
been dedicated on this subject.   I'm adding Bill Drake who is probably
the best know "doyen" in this area who now teaches this topic at the
Geneva Graduate Institute and has spent many decades researching and
writing about this topic.  Bill remembers when the progressive
communications community was raising the same issues for "the ISDN."

It always seemed that the French had the best term for this -
politique.  There are a great many venues of all kinds of flavours
generating internet protocol standards these days.  That includes
proprietary standards.  With everything rapidly moving to NFV-SDN
instantiations, it is getting even more diverse.  A great many if not
most of them "mediate many aspects of modern life, and therefore
contributes to the ordering of societies and communities" as noted in
the draft, On the Politics of Standards,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-tenoever-hrpc-political/

The current draft could benefit from a broader perspective and healthy
skepticism, e.g., Morozov's and the enormous body of material written on
this subject over the decades rather than the somewhat self-similar ones
referenced.  If  you really want to shape future implementations - you
need, for example,  to comment on 3GPP as a venue and its internet
standards.  It is bigger than all the other public standards bodies put
together, and its standards are mandatory for the global mobile internet.

There is also the quadrennial treaty conference coming up in Dubai in a
few months where the world's nations will be assembling to consider
these same topics and develop or amend treaty provisions and
resolutions.  You can assess and read all the current provisions and
input contributions at <https://www.itu.int/md/S18-PP-C/en>  Are
standards really biased to disadvantage developing countries?

Another fundamental challenge that is ignored, is the reality that all
these standards are incorporated into overwhelmingly privately owned
equipment, networks, cloud data centers, running code, service
offerings, and operational practices.  How exactly are these all to be
shaped??  To answer my own question - it is found in the "Human Rights
as a Service" Internet-Draft.  Let everyone analyse their work and
characterize their products with actual human rights tags! 
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rutkowski-hrpc-hraas/>

best,
tony

On 20-Jul-18 4:33 AM, Corinne Cath wrote:
> I like a.) Notes on networking standards and politics part of this
> whole process imho is to get people to read the doc to begin with,
> which seems most likely with a clear and recognizable title. my 2
> cents, corinne 
>
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 1:19 AM, Mark Perkins
> <marknoumea=[e-mail]
> <mailto:marknoumea=[e-mail]..org>> wrote:
>
>     'Notes on networking standards and politics'
>
>     get my vote!
>
>     Mark Perkins
>
>     On Friday, July 20, 2018, 10:10:27 AM GMT+11, Niels ten Oever
>     <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>
>
>     Off-list discussion with Stephen resulted in a new option:
>
>     'Notes on networking standards and politics'
>
>     That gives us a few options:
>
>     a) Notes on networking standards and politics
>     b) On Value Neutrality and the Politics of Standards
>     c) Notes on Value Neutrality and the Politics of Standards
>     d) ?
>
>     Curious to hear what the RG thinks sounds best, new suggestions
>     ofc also
>     welcome.
>
>     Best,
>
>     Niels
>
>     On 07/20/2018 12:43 AM, Niels ten Oever wrote:
>     >
>     >
>     > On 07/20/2018 12:38 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>     >>
>     >> Hiya,
>     >>
>     >> On 19/07/18 23:33, Niels ten Oever wrote:
>     >>> Hi all,
>     >>>
>     >>> Thank you all very much for the spirited discussion at the
>     session. To
>     >>> resolve the issue with draft political and remove the last
>     issue mention
>     >>> blocking adoption I would like to propose to rename the draft:
>     >>>
>     >>> On Value Neutrality and the Politics of Standards
>     >>
>     >> Meh:-)
>     >>
>     >> How'd something more like "Some background on networking standards
>     >> and politics" work? That seems to describe the content of the draft
>     >> better to me, (modulo not having carefully read the latest rev,
>     as I
>     >> admitted at the mic, so don't take me too seriously.)
>     >>
>     >> My reason for suggesting that is to try end up with something that
>     >> would be less surprising for an IETF (or IEEE 802 or W3C...)
>     reader.
>     >>
>     >
>     > Exactly that audience is saying time and again that 'technology is
>     > neutral' / 'protocols are neutral' / 'standards are neutral'.
>     That is I
>     > would like to address that in the title (and the draft).
>     >
>     > Following work can then address how we could come up with
>     approaches to
>     > address that.
>     >
>     >
>     >> Cheers,
>     >> S.
>     >>
>     >>
>     >>>
>     >>> Would that work for you all? I also added a few mentions of value
>     >>> neutrality (and the lack thereof) for consistency in the abstract,
>     >>> introduction, conclusion and the way forward.
>     >>>
>     >>> Changes can be seen here:
>     >>>
>     https://github.com/nllz/IRTF-HRPC/commit/03826cd73959e692bb1f7aa305f9fbdee325dbd2#diff-fb9d617868a367dd946ef225cc5e6de1
>     <https://github.com/nllz/IRTF-HRPC/commit/03826cd73959e692bb1f7aa305f9fbdee325dbd2#diff-fb9d617868a367dd946ef225cc5e6de1>
>     >>>
>     >>> Happy to discuss.
>     >>>
>     >>> Best,
>     >>>
>     >>> Niels
>     >>>
>     >
>
>     -- 
>     Niels ten Oever
>     Researcher and PhD Candidate
>     Datactive Research Group
>     University of Amsterdam
>
>     PGP fingerprint      2458 0B70 5C4A FD8A 9488
>                       643A 0ED8 3F3A 468A C8B3
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> -- 
> Corinne Cath
> Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford Internet Institute & Alan Turing Institute
>
> Web: www.oii..ox.ac.uk/people/corinne-cath
> <http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/corinne-cath>
> Email: [e-mail] <mailto:ccath@turing..ac.uk> &
> [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>
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