Re: [Pearg] [saag] Ten years after Snowden (2013 - 2023), is IETF keeping its promises?

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

 

> Il 04/01/2023 20:33 CET Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
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> > I still think this was a big fail; in fact, this implies that counteraction against surveillance capitalism practices can only happen elsewhere, at the regulatory level, as the IETF community either does not know what to do about it, or does not want to do anything about it.
> > 
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> I don't think this is true at all.
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> First, the IETF *is* working on issues around privacy and preventing various forms of surveillance capitalism. That's in part what initiatives like DoH, QUIC, TLS 1.3, ECH, OHAI, MASQUE etc. are about.
> 
Of course you will disagree with what I am going to say, but here is the common (though not unanimous) viewpoint from the technical policy community of a different part of the world - no offense implied.
 
In Europe, "surveillance capitalism" is basically synonymous with a set of a few very big American companies that happen to be the ones promoting and deploying the standards you mention. So, it will be hard to convince people in Brussels or Berlin that those standards are meant to put the business model of their proponents under check. Actually, they are more likely to lead to the conclusion that the IETF is being used as an instrument to further that business model, and that the encrypted network architecture that it is promoting is meant to disempower end-users and any other party (including European law enforcement and privacy authorities) from checking what the endpoints do, which information they send and who they send it to, facilitating uncontrolled data extraction practices by the private companies that mostly control the endpoints, i.e. the above ones.
 
There is a general feeling that the bigger threats to user privacy are now not in transit, but in or before the endpoints. So, the fact that the IETF does not want to consider threats in the endpoints is seen as additional evidence for the above.
 

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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