[Mod-discuss] Re: Is there a problem?

["D. J. Bernstein" <[e-mail]>]

Ted Lemon writes:
> We decided collectively fairly early on in the chartering process that
> assertions of the type I just made to which you are responding are
> generally known to be true by the participants, and that discussing
> them in specific detail would derail the process

Interesting claim. Who's "we"? Where's the URL showing this omerta
agreement? When I wrote "the evidence that supposedly motivates the
draft hasn't been presented publicly to the WG", why did Rob Wilton
write "I may be misremembering, but I think that such discussion has
happened within this WG during its early stages", rather than by saying
"We agreed to bury the evidence"? Was he not part of the agreement?

Anyway, the rest of this message spells out three independent reasons
that a claim of this type doesn't justify hiding the supposed evidence.
(I still find the claim interesting for other reasons.)


1. RFC 2418 says "A charter is a contract between a working group and
the IETF to perform a set of tasks." Here's the MODPOD charter:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20250916162345/https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-modpod/

Your claim about what an unspecified set of people supposedly agreed
upon is not what's stated in the charter, so it's not what MODPOD is
tasked to do.


2. Regarding WG disputes, RFC 2418 says "To achieve the goals of
openness and fairness, such conflicts must be resolved by a process of
open review and discussion."

That's a mandated process: see the word "must"? This isn't something
that a WG charter can override. It's not something that WG majorities
can agree to ignore.

If a confirmation-bias-driven project is derailed because the claimed
evidence doesn't survive open review and discussion: Good! That's the
mandated WG process in action. This is also an example of how important
it is to distinguish disruption of _the WG process_ from disruption of
_progress of a document_.


3. The question of _legitimacy_ isn't the same as the question of
whether one can get away with something under IETF procedures.

IETF LLC claims that "IETF activities are conducted with extreme
transparency, in public forums" and that "Decision-making requires
achieving broad consensus via these public processes". Hiding evidence
creates instant credibility problems. It creates legal problems. It
makes everyone involved look corrupt, no matter how well-intentioned
they actually are.

Consider the fact that, out of more than a thousand respondents to the
latest IETF LLC survey, almost 70% _disagreed_ with the claim that RFCs
almost always reflect IETF consensus: they said "often", or "sometimes",
or even less. This indicates a serious systemic problem with specs being
non-consensually rammed through IETF's procedures, a sufficiently
pervasive problem that several hundred people reported seeing it.

Most of the people dissenting from IETF decisions still haven't heard
that this WG is setting up procedures that---if rammed through _this_
WG---will inevitably be used to silence dissent. But, once the silencing
begins, many of the victims will look back at what happened here. The
silencing will also mean _even more_ companies being screwed by IETF,
and then it's simply a matter of time before IETF is dragged into court.
The targets of a lawsuit won't just be IETF LLC and the monopolists who
abused IETF's procedures to the detriment of whichever companies are
suing; the targets will also be, e.g., Mozilla and Cisco for paying
their employees to come to IETF and set up procedures that were so easy
to abuse in the first place.

As an analogy, HydroLevel sued standards-development organization ASME
along with various individuals and companies, and won in the Supreme
Court. ASME was forced to pay millions. ASME had _more_ procedural
protections than IETF does, but still not enough to prevent abuse.


---D. J. Bernstein