Re: [Pearg] I-D Action: draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-04.txt

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 13/07/2020 20:46 [e-mail] ha scritto:
> 
>  
> A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

Before I forget - since we said we'd discuss it on the list - I have an idea to address the ongoing disagreement on the meaning of "censorship". We could replace the initial definition of censorship with a brief discussion on the fact that there is no agreement in the I*TF community on what it means, and that different people use the term, in broader or narrower terms, to identify:

1. any blocking of content
2. any blocking of content except when done for technical and network security reasons (botnets, malware etc)
3. only the blocking of political content opposing a country's regime

So for a significant part of the Internet community these techniques can be used for legitimate purposes other than censorship, and this should be acknowledged from the beginning, agreeing that not everyone using these techniques is a censor or accepts to be depicted like that.

Then, it seems to me (though I haven't gone through the draft checking each and every reference) that almost all examples in the draft relate to authoritarian countries and to the narrow definition #3. This leaves us with a number of possibilities:
- complete the survey with examples of the other uses of these techniques, while mentioning that these are not considered censorship by everyone;
- only limit the survey to the examples that fall in #3, as these are unanimously considered to be censorship;
- something in the middle, e.g. leave some examples of "non-political censorship" (such as the EU examples at the end of page 16) but mention that they are not generally considered to be cases of censorship.

I would be happy to work on text, but first I'd like to see if this approach would make sense for everyone.

-- 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy