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

[michael gurstein]

Good points Norbert, I agree that going the route of the IETF also might be
a place to start... Since the path towards enforcing responsible behaviour
by Google unfortunately looks like it may be a long and difficult one,
taking multiple paths to achieve this would be a useful strategy.

M

-----Original Message-----
From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org
[mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Norbert Bollow
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 2:11 AM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Blogpost: Gmail Hell Day 4: Dealing with the Borg
(Or "Being Evil" Without Really Thinking About It


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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