Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-05.txt

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

   Whereas there might not be agreement among the Internet protocol
   community on the specific political nature of the technological
   development process and its outputs, it is generally agreed that
   standards and protocols are both products of a political process, and
   they can also be used for political means.

I would like to register my agrement with Andrew and focus in on this
one point: there are many protocols (in fact, by count probably most
protocols) which are just designed by proprietary organizations.  It's
not clear on what basis you are claiming that they are the output of
political processes and this certainly doesn't seem like something
that's generally agreed. I certainly agree that they "can be used"
for political means, though any "can" statement is pretty weak.

This is even true at some level for many standards, especially
because your definition of "standard" is so expansive:

   Standards  'A standard is an agreed-upon way of doing something or
      measuring something.'  [Sisson]

By this definition I think it would be pretty hard to argue that
SSLv2,  and SSLv3 weren't standards given their wide use, even
though they were just designed by people at one company. Another
example would be the Philips screwdriver head. What's the political
process that produced these?


More generally, it seems like depending on how one interprets the
major claims in this document, they are either too strong (all
protocol and standards development is political) or trivial (some
protocol and standards development is political). The first is too
strong for the reasons I indicate above, and the second seems pretty
obvious and doesn't really need much theorizing; one needs just point
to the development of some protocol which was a political process, and
it seems like that's been pretty amply documented for a number of
protocols/standards (e.g., HTTP/2 or TLS 1.0).

As I noted above, the claim that protocols can be used for political
means also seems relatively obvious (cf. Tor).

In short, I don't think this document should be published as an RFC
without major revision, which would presumably start with fleshing
out some more interesting claims.

-Ekr





On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 11:40 AM Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Apparently I haven't taken my OCD medications, and therefore I'm
> looking at this and responding.  I mostly looked at diffs between -04
> and -06.  Still speaking just for me.
>
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 05:27:53PM +0200, Niels ten Oever wrote:
> > I am curious to hear whether you think these adaptations help address
> some of your issues.
> >
> > Suggestion, comments, discussion, and pull requests are always welcome:
>
> In §1, I do not find economic impacts described in RFC 613.  I find
> RFC 3271 to be a bizarre reference, and very hard to justify given the
> way cited here.  I am totally mystified about how RFC 101 illustrates
> early community members making political decisions.  I'm having a hard
> time hooking up most of these other RFCs with this claim, too, and I
> wonder if it isn't the same question-begging I've raised before: just
> because a thing has somehow been the implication of a political
> process does not actually show that the thing is _itself_ political.
> If the entire approach is simply to take BramanII thesis as proven,
> then state that and get rid of all the other supposed support here,
> which is inadequate to prove the point and is obscure enough that the
> reader needs to do the work of chasing the references anyway.
>
> The reliance on the definition of Internet Standards in §2 is going to
> yield a rather underwhelming conclusion, since an awful lot of the
> Internet runs on stuff that isn't Internet Standard.  This includes
> HTTP 1.0, 1.1, and 2, so it's not like it's a little gap.
>
> In §5, the claim of "general agreement" is empirical and has nowhere
> been demonstrated that I can see.  And this discussion is _prima
> facie_ evidence against the claim.
>
> In §6, again things that are presented as "conclusions" are really
> just positions that are not actually argued for in the text.  This
> conclusion basically says that if you accept Russell, then the
> use-context counts.  But unstated here is the acceptance that Russell
> is right and also that therefore the use-context counts.  That's
> literally what's at stake in the discussion, and the I-D has not
> proven any of this at all.  The entire section continues to beg the
> question.  Either make an argument somewhere for this conclusion, or
> just take it out.
>
> I'm unlikely to have another train ride soon where I get to look at
> this again, so please don't take my future silence as agreement (or
> disagreement).  It's just silence.
>
> Best regards,
>
> A
>
> --
> Andrew Sullivan
> [e-mail]
>
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