Re: [Internetgovtech] Involvement from other constituencies

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Pranesh,
At 21:26 28-02-2014, Pranesh Prakash wrote:
>I couldn't disagree more strongly with this :)
>
>Protocol decisions whether it is the trust system which underlies 
>BGP, the CA system, or the attempting to make all public XMPP 
>servers use s2s and c2s encryption by default, or many other kinds 
>of decisions, are inherently deeply political.
>
>The decision to require all SMTP servers to only prepend to the 
>"received" header, has political ramifications.  The attempt by so 
>many people to "fix" what they see as the broken system of e-mail 
>(since until further changes are made[1] there is neither metadata 
>integrity (for the most part, discounting that which DKIM covers) 
>nor is there any possibility of concealing metadata) is also deeply political.
>
>The question of whether to allow for patent-encumbered standards is 
>a deeply political question.[2][3][4]
>
>It is, imho, futile to pretend that engineers don't make political 
>decisions all the time.

A technical specification can have a political ramifications.  There 
are also privacy considerations.  I am not sure at the moment whether 
to list that under political ramifications or not.  I made the 
following argument some time ago [1]:

   "When a person sends an email the person consents to the transmission of an
    email address.  The email address is necessary for the recipient 
of the email
    to be able to reply to it."

I cannot think of another way for the technology to work if, for 
example, I do not include an email address for you to send me a 
reply.  As I have not reviewed the S/MIME draft I prefer not to 
comment about it.

There can be political ramifications to BGPSEC, the CA system, and 
maybe even email.  It would require  a lot of people to identify the 
political ramifications [2].  Let's say that some entity is created 
for all that.  The open source people might have a higher barrier to 
overcome [3].

A well-written technical standard would have minimized political 
ramifications to an extent that it is not worth bothering 
about.  There is still the intellectual property question.  Open 
source people usually do not like technical standards which are 
covered by patents.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-moonesamy-privacy-identifiers-01
2. There are a lot of technical specifications and different 
organizations involved.
3. There is already a high barrier as it is to stay involved.