Re: @EXT: RE: United Nations report on Internet standards

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 27/03/2020 23:30 Keith Moore <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> On 3/27/20 5:47 PM, Marcolla, Sara Veronica wrote:
> 
> > The issue is, when government representative participate to IETF (or a RIR, or ICANN, or a NOG), they do so in their official capacity, thus representing to some extent their organisation. They (we) do understand the concept, however it is impossible to attend without this sort of "official" hat. So on one hand there is Joe-as-himself, and on the other hand there in Alice-as-a-whole-government-rep. How do we make this work better for everyone's benefit in IETF?
> 
> In all cases the burden is on the contributor to build rough consensus 
> for their proposal and they do so not by wielding power but by making a 
> sound case that their proposal benefits the Internet as a whole.   

I think that one key problem of this discussion is that we are lumping together two very different things.

One thing is developing technical standards. In that case, there might be alternatives and even conflicting business interests, but it is still possible to come to an agreement on what "benefits the Internet as a whole". So the consensus method, among individuals that merge their brains to share ideas and make the best possible assessment, can work.

Another thing is choosing between different policies. In that case, there is conceptually no choice that "benefits the Internet as a whole"; almost always, there will only be choices that benefit some people and disadvantage others, or, if you prefer, that benefit the Internet according to some people's concept of what is best for the Internet, but damage the Internet according to some other people's concept. 

In that case, the consensus method will often fail, because there is no possible consensus to be reached. You can only define formal ways to let people express their views, promote a compromise if possible, but in the end pick one view over the other.

That's nothing new; that's how policy-making works, including in general government and politics. There are ~2500 years of philosophical and practical thought on how to deal with that, which led to modern democratic governments, which are based on formalized entities (parties) that represent a weighed set of citizens, and then to the critique of the effectiveness of democratic governments in making the best possible choice, which evolved towards an attempt to bridge the consensus method with the principle of representation - that is, the so-called multistakeholderism that many of us specified 15-20 years ago in Internet policy venues.

No one outside the IETF has problems with the IETF using its own traditional method to make technical choices. However, the concerns arise when the IETF makes policy choices that are de facto binding for the whole Internet. For example, privileging encryption over security is a policy choice. Designing technologies to circumvent national and personal content control points is a policy choice. IETF participants seem to oscillate between claiming that these are objectively good policy choices (as if an "objectively good" policy choice could ever exist) and claiming that these are in fact technical choices (but they are not).

Non-technical stakeholders react late to these choices, because they only realize they have been made when the Internet companies embed them in their ubiquitous products. Nonetheless, many of them - not just governments; see how many digital rights NGOs exist and deal with Internet issues - feel like these choices should be made according to common policy-making principles, not to common technical standardization principles.

Personally, I agree that there's a problem but I have no clear idea yet of how to deal with it. Of course I wouldn't want to have governments dictate what standards should do, but I don't think anyone is asking for that - not even governments, except maybe a few non-Western ones. But I also think that it is not fair that these choices are made almost only by first world engineers, mostly male, white, middle-aged and company-backed like me, without even listening to what others have to say, because there is not an established way to gather that input reliably and effectively. How to address this is IMHO a discussion worth having.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy