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

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

Dear Andrew,

On 9/20/19 8:39 PM, Andrew Sullivan 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. 

Sentence one of RFC613 is:

"Network topology is a complicated political and economic question with
obvious technical overtones"


> I find
> RFC 3271 to be a bizarre reference, and very hard to justify given the
> way cited here.  

RFC3271 extensively talk about the interrelation between the Internet and economics and politics. I have a really hard time understanding how you can argue against that.


> I am totally mystified about how RFC 101 illustrates
> early community members making political decisions.  

The involvement of Terry Shepard and the demands the Canadian government made for the Internet infrastructure and architecture is not political?

> 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.

The claim that things in itself is something is removed from the conclusion.

> 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.
> 

I do not see how this contradicts the definition from RFC2026, but maybe I am missing something?


> 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.
> 

We are seeking what we can agree upon, right? Several times people have now acknowledged that it is obvious that protocols are the conclusion of a political process, and political things can be done with them. If we document that agreement, then I think we have achieved the goal of this document.

The fact that it is so hard to agree on this, show the importance of the document, and that shows that the statement is not trivial. 

> 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.
> 

The conclusion emerges from the analysis of the different documented positions. 

Best,

Niels

> 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
> 

-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
DATACTIVE Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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