RE: United Nations report on Internet standards

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Hello Sara,
On 28-Mar-20 10:47, Marcolla, Sara Veronica wrote:
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Brian E Carpenter
> 
> <snip>
> 
> The singularity of the IETF is that there is no "representation"
> since all participants contribute as individuals. This is something that I guarantee we have been trying to convey to government and international officials since 1994 to my personal knowledge and probably longer. While I was IAB chair (1995-2000) I spent quite a lot of time doing that, since liaisons are an IAB responsibility.
> 
> Such officials have genuine difficulty in understanding this concept, until they actually attend a few meetings.
>  <snip>
> 
> 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. 

But that isn't so different from employees of companies. When I attended the IETF as a CERN (as an international civil servant), IBM, or University of Auckland employee, that's what it said on my badge and it was an official work trip following my employer's travel policy, expense rules, etc. But I knew that my contributions were treated only as personal contributions. We all live in the real world and know that a person's contributions are strongly influenced by their day job. And a perfectly valid contribution is to inform the community that Europol has issued policy statement X or that IBM has concluded that it won't implement RFC Y.

> 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?

Alice could say "The Elbonian government has mandated wire-tapping of all Internet traffic entering or leaving Elbonia." But that doesn't count more than Joe saying "Wire-tapping damages end to end security for the following reasons:..." Actually that's pretty much what happened before RFC 2804.

Footnote: When I was in the IAB, ISOC Board and IESG, I made sure that I had formal agreement from my employer that I was *not* formally representing them. In the limit, any official could take this approach even for general participation.

Stay well,
   Brian