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

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi Stephen,

> On 23 Sep 2019, at 14:20, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> I guess taking the Devil's (or Niels':-) advocate approach
> for a second maybe one could argue that NTP is such a well
> deployed protocol that some putative changes to NTP (or
> away from NTP) could by highly political, or that the use
> of certain servers could be political, but that seems to
> be a bit of a stretch to me, as a basis on which to claim
> that NTP itself, as a protocol, is political.


Indeed, but this is where I think we have to understand the intersection of politics and economics.  The WTO views those sorts of changes, when they come from a national standards authority in the form of a normative requirement as a trade barrier, and rightly so.  But viewed from the IETF perspective it would invole  a tussle of entrenched players versus those who seek some sort of disruptive advantage.  In as much as the latter are some socio-economic class, perhaps one could turn this into a political discussion, but here I am mindful of the words of Milton and Farzaneh, who caution us that it is difficult to predict political impact a priori.[2]

Eliot
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/poi3.190