Re: [hrpc] Censorship

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

On 13-03-2022 22:40, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> ObDisclaimer: I work at the Internet Society, but I am not speaking for them in this posting and do not participate in the work of this RG in my professional capacity either.
> 
> On Sat, Mar 12, 2022 at 10:18:22AM +0100, Bill Woodcock wrote:
> 
>> Exactly.  There is no authority.  Merely a lot of mechanisms that do different things.  This is a proposed mechanism, which may achieve an end for some people.  Anyone who doesn’t need it or doesn’t like it is free to ignore it.
> 
> That is not what "sanction" means, or at least not what it means in this context.
> 
> The "sanctions statement" as written starts out comparing the case of possible sanctions to be imposed by "the global Internet governance community" to the ones imposed by governments.  Governments impose economic sanctions through the force of law, and anyone subject to that government's jurisdiction and who does not comply with the sanctions faces penalties that usually include things like serious fines and jail time.
> 
> If parties A, B, and C curtail their economic activity with party T, and invite any other party to come along, but do not use any coercive effort to bring those others along, it's not "sanction".  It's a boycott. 

A boycott implies consumer choice. A 'coordinated infrastructural boycott' is as much a hard to grasp concept as 'multistakeholder sanctions', both concepts are imperfect, as is often the case with new initiatives.

  If the proposal were for a new list to be published that enabled the rest of the world to understand the official Western Internet goodguys' opinion of who on the Internet is an official Internet badguy who ought therefore to be boycotted, I might still think it gross but I might not think it a mortal threat to the Internet.  This sanctions statement, however, does threaten the Internet because of the very use of the word "sanction". That will automatically be read by governments as "Here's the list you should encode in your laws of people not to talk to."
> 

In my conversations with government officials about this topic, that was not my impression at all.


> In any case, in the hope of talking here about something related to this RG's charter, I went and had a look at the latest at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-hrpc-association/, in light of the sanctions statement.
> 
> It seemed to me that, if there is some kind of freedom of association on the Internet, then protocols that tend to create advantages for connectivity would be preferable to those that do not. Now, the sanctions statement proposes a kind of "shunning shutdown" in which an official list of networks to be shunned on political grounds is to be published and, presumably, acted upon by other networks under some kind of threat. One supposes that networks who did not operate in the desired way would also find themselves on the political sanction list, because there isn't really another threat possible.  Such effects would erode connectivity.


This really is a misrepresentation of the position. Especially since that would not at all proportional, which is one of the main concepts in the statement.

What really is bad for connectivity is the Russian government bombing connectivity infrastructure and Internet users, as well as the filtering they do on their own networks. That is what is eroding connectivity.


> 
> It follows from this that one should prefer protocols that are resistant to this sort of shunning shutdown, because they are better enablers of people's freedom of assiciation than protocols that enable shunning shutdown.

No, because some networks and their operators limit others networks and people's connection and interconnection. Limiting them in order to do that might lead to an overall increase. This very much comes back to Popper's Open Society and It's Enemies that there should be measures that ensure intolerance for intolerance.

> 
> I was surprised that this fairly straightforward entailment did not ring out clearly to me from the text of draft-irtf-hrpc-association.  (To be honest, I find the dcument extremely wooly and hard to follow, so nothing really rings out clearly from it.)

This discussion perhaps does not belong here, but this is most probably due to the fact that change control of the RG documents lies with the RG, and we implemented every change proposed by the RG. So maybe indeed too many consensus opinions makes thing wooly. On the other hand that means that a lot of opinions are included.

   There was, however, a tantalizing observation in the conclusion that
> 
>          non-interoperable
>     platforms in chat and social media networks have a significant impact
>     on the distributed and open nature of the Internet.
> 
> A protocol by which some networks are targetted for shunning shutdown will, by its very nature, lead to an increase in non-interoperation.  I therefore conclude that the sanctions statement proposes that a new protocol should be designed that would be harmful to human rights on the Internet.

Again, not taking into account how such a network and its operators might negatively impact other users. See the (extensive) discussions that were held on DDoS here.

> 
> By the way, I note that I appear in the Acknowledgements of draft-irtf-hrpc-association.  If it's all the same to the editors, I don't think I had anything to do with the document and I'd just as soon not be associated with it.

You helped us come up with some defitions as the Acknowledgements section describes, but if you want I'll remove you right away:

https://github.com/IRTF-HRPC/draft-association/commit/d80db8b3c0034235c351362f229d2aa83dd2556c

Best,

Niels

> 
> Best regards,
> 
> A
> 

-- 
Niels ten Oever, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher - Media Studies Department - University of Amsterdam
Affiliated Faculty - Digital Democracy Institute - Simon Fraser University
Non-Resident Fellow 2022-2023 - Center for Democracy & Technology
Associated Scholar - Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade - Fundação Getúlio Vargas
Research Fellow - Centre for Internet and Human Rights - European University Viadrina

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Read my latest article on Internet infrastructure governance in Globalizations here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2021.1953221