[governance] Blogpost: Gmail Hell Day 4: Dealing with the Borg (Or “Being Evil” Without Really Thinking About It

[Norbert Bollow]

Michael Gurstein <mgurst at vcn.bc.ca> wrote (addressing primarily McTim):
> It is I think only a matter of time before this is widely recognized
> politically and some sort of regulatory environment established--it is
> probably only delayed because of the speed of evolution of the tech, the
> technological illiteracy of most politicians (among the last groups in the
> world to move into the email enabled world--according to studies in
> various countries), and the difficulty of transnational regulation and the
> absence of a framework through which such regulation could be introduced
> and managed.
All these seem to be pretty serious difficulties in my eyes (even
thouh an --admittedly far from perfect-- framework for the
introduction and management of such regulation already exists, see
my last paragraph below)... and add to that the fact that any attempt
at such regulation must be careful to avoid bad side effects auch as
making it prohibitively difficult for small providers to comply, or
making it too difficult or risky to provide email or other
communication services to people in other countries. Plus the
political obstacles that you'll face from people who are concerned
about the possibility of such negative side-effects and who would
therefore rather avoid such regulation altogether -- unless you are
careful to remove these risks before you enter the political arena,
it wouldn't be just industry lobbyists who oppose proposals for such
regulation, but many civil society folks also.

> Your reference to PEBKAC is ridiculous...
Yes, the particular context of that PEBKAC assertion was ridiculous
because it was pointing a finger in the wrong direction. But I believe
that there's a significant amount of PEBKAC involved at Google. In
fact, I would suggest that your experience points to significant
problems at three levels:
(A) PEBKAC at Google - whoever either disabled your account manually
    or wrote the script that did that
(B) Lack of adequate policies and processes at Google to avoid
    problem (A) or at least get it fixed quickly if it occurs
(C) In the existing framework of Internet governance, lack of any
    effective action aimed at avoiding or minimizing problem (A) or (B).

(I draw the conclusion about the lack of effective action aimed at
avoiding or minimizing problem (A) or (B) both from your experience
and from the fact that someone as knowledgeable as McTim about the
existing framework of Internet governance can even disagree with our
assertion that there is a problem here that should be addressed at the
Internet governance level. :-) )

To make my position quite explicit, I think that the path of effective
Internet governance action regarding this kind of problem doesn't
start with calling for governmental regulation, but rather it starts
with developing (at IETF) a reasonable Internet Standard that
specifies the MUSTs and SHOULDs of responsibly providing email
services to members of the general public.

If once we have such a standards-track RFC, the situation still
doesn't improve, we could then talk about escalating the issue by
means of a fast-track submission of the RFC to become an ISO/IEC
International Standard, and then suggesting to governments to make
conformance to that standard legally mandatory. But I have a feeling
that a standards-track RFC would sufficiently influence the major
providers of web-based email services that such escalation wouldn't
even be needed.

Greetings,
Norbert

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