A report on certain standards (was Re: United Nations report on Internet standards)

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I'm employed by the Internet Society but I'm responding to this
in my personal capacity.

On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 09:54:18AM -0600, Kyle Rose wrote:

> I imagine there are few participants who would be in favor of privileged
> access or powers given to governments: I certainly would be vehemently
> opposed to any such change in our processes.

I don't think that is the only thing going on in this report (though
it's definitely a thing), and I think it is important to understand
the other bit going on in order not to get in trouble from
misunderstanding.  (Also, we should be clear, this is not a UN report
and AFAICT is in fact is just an independent contribution from two
firms.  If it had been submitted in the IETF, it would be an Internet
Draft or maybe something published on the Independent Submission
stream.)

I have a number of deep reservations about that report and indeed the
problem description it started with.  But one of my concerns is what I
think of as a mistaken view it has of "stakeholders" on the Internet.
It basically has a demarcated-stakeholder model of how one
participates in standards-making.  This approach is not too dissimilar
to the mechanisms ICANN uses for its participation: one is involved in
the effort wearing one or more clear and distinct hat(s).  This
version of "multistakeholderism" is common among those who come from a
fairly institutionalist background, and is probably natural for those
from governments (where an important job is to assert power in one's
sphere of influence, but where another important job is not to
overstep the bounds).

The IETF does not naturally work this way, which is part of why its
institutional design _attends to_ the professional affiliations of
people without counting them as officially significant most of the
time.  The IETF for that reason does not really have a
"multistakeholder" design in the sense that people with a more
institutionalist bent tend to think of it.  The IETF standards
mechanism, for instance, does not have an official way to acknowledge
that there is a "legitimate role for governments" or other kinds of
demarcations that are common to others' process designs.  (To see how
that demarcated-stakeholder assumption in action, have a look at
essentially all of section 4 and section 5.4 of the resulting report.)
Similarly, the report is somewhat mystified by its inability to get
participation from "representatives of" the IETF.

If one is going to engage with this report from an IETF perpective, it
will be necessary to understand this basic gap in world-view that is
hiding behind it.  If one puts oneself in the position of someone who
understands the world as fundamentally political processes with
various kinds of officially-tokenized representatives (the
stakeholders) involved in the process, then the report seems like a
well-meaning attempte to incorporate standards for the monolithic into
that process.  It is only if you have a completely different
understanding of what the Internet is and how it functions that the
report seems to be tackling the wrong problem.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]