[governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes

Thu Jan 26 04:56:00 EST 2012

Dear Parminder and members of the list

I understand and support most of your critics as well as I thank Karl for his analysis of "normative" processes that took place in the IP era and field. 
I was involved in the early 90ties in telecom normative processes headed by the ITU-T (mainly SDH and Optical fiber transmission). This was at the (finishing) era when we were given sufficient time to exchange and improve technical proposals in a realistc way because we'd a solid knowledge due to our (generally long) experience in real networking and network evolution.  This was the "good time" for engineers and network architects that led i.a. to valid protocols in network management. 
But the then recently privatized sector (where ITU was a catalysator) soon made an end to this "intellectual" and iterative process. With the support of ITU, this "too long normative process" was replaced it by a "fast track" one, and the growing role of the private sector members fostered by the ITU itself did the rest for killing such a technical and engineering "forum" (it was also very convivial since some of us became friends over the time). Objective : the private sector needs a more rapid pace for new  technology generation ... and for generating more revenues. With the blessing of the ITU.

That's why I come back to¨Parminders mail :  

We should also be "alarmed" about the ITU -still an intergovernmental UN agency- and question the predominent role and place that the private sector is playing therein.  This shift goes beyond telecoms since this UN agency is officially in charge of the WSIS, a process that is supposed to address society issues and  give them a "consensual" response. 

Best
Jean-Louis Fullsack
CSDPTT - France

> Message du 26/01/12 10:00
> De : "parminder" 
> A : governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> Copie à : 
> Objet : Re: [governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes
> 
> 
> 
> On Thursday 26 January 2012 01:39 PM, Ian Peter wrote: Backing up Karl's point - as someone involved in anti spam IETF efforts, I can assure you that it was pragmatic politics (the need to involve Microsoft) rather than merit or best solutions, than dominated IETF efforts. The result is evident. Nothing wrong with that - I think everything is wrong with this. (This brings to my mind all the despicable things that Microsoft did for getting the OOXML (non) standard recognised.)  Private players should be denied any such political power, and there should be enough checks in the systems for this purpose. Traditionally democratic governance systems try to explicitly keep many insitutional checks in place for this purpose. However, evidently, the new post-democratic information society governance systems find such 'accommodations' quite acceptable even normatively, what to speak of practice.
> 
> And such a 'pro-powerful' model is being exported to more and areas of our social life. For instance, one notices with alarm the growing business sector influence in WHO, which is now being institutionally accommodated ( BTW, which is right now being strongly resisted by global and national civil society actors in the health area, unlike what is the case in the IG space.)
> 
> Doing governance with the prior accent of the most powerful is a feudal age idea which one thought was superseded by the democracy movement. But multistakeholderism as a governance system, in and by itself, seems to taking us back to the dark ages.
> 
> parminder 
> 
> but that the suggestion that IETF operates purely on technical grounds with no other considerations, is nonsense. From: Karl Auerbach Reply-To: , Karl Auerbach Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:48:50 -0800 To: Subject: Re: [governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes On 01/25/2012 01:11 AM, McTim wrote: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/25/who-really-stopped-sopa-an d-why/ The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open. The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. As a person who runs a company that does protocol testing I can attest that the notion of testing protocols is a notion that has withered and left us with many code bases that are... let's be euphemistic and say that they are not industrial strength. Those who have spent decades in the IETF know that the notion of technical meritocracy has sometimes been a facade. One of the most overt instances of politics over technology occurred back in the mid 1980's when there were three different network management protocols on the table. One (HEMS) was elegant, but not deeply implemented. Another (SGMP/SNMP) was ugly and weak but had some implementations. The last was CMIP from ISO/OSI. For political reasons HEMS was sent to die. CMIP was retained as a sop to the then growing GOSIP, MAP, TOP bandwagon for ISO/OSI. More recently, but still in the network management path, the NETCONF protocol has had to wear the intentionally deceiving dressing of a "configuration" protocol even though everyone admits that it is a dandy network "management" protocol. I know from personal experience that when we standardized (in RFC1001/1002) what eventually became the CIFS protocol (used by Microsoft systems today) that because of pressure from the higher layers of the IETF we had to throw out a very elegant design and replace it with a much less elegant and scalable design based on DNS. (I remember Paul Mockepetris once standing on a table, glowering, pointing down at me, and in a deep and strong voice declaring that because of those RFCs that I "have destroyed DNS".) And we can go back to the beginning of IPv6 - there were several competing proposals on the table. One that had particularly strong technical merits was TUBA - it was essentially the ISO/OSI connection-less network layer protocol with an address space much larger than IPv6 and many other very nice aspects - such as a decent checksum algorithm. But it was ISO/OSI and even today much of that technology, no matter how well conceived, is still anathema. For instance, in IPv4/v6 there is "mobile IP" - which is really a very strange kind of triangular routing with all kinds of performance and security issues. ISO/OSI had a different method for this - it used a thing called a "session" layer that makes unnecessary all of the juggling we see in mobile IP. We still see the relics of the IP versus ISO/OSI wars - one of these relics affects internet governance directly in the form of a kind of robot-like automatic rejection of anything associated with the ITU (which was one of the engines behind ISO/OSI.) None of this is to say that the IETF and internet ignore technical merit. But to say that the IETF's output is not affected by political forces would be to say something that is not fully accurate. Back around 1990 the IETF faced a decision - was it to be a technical body or become a standards body. It chose the latter. And I think that many people who participated both before and after that date feel that that change marked a distinct reduction in the innovative quality of the work being done. (It does not help either that the management of many tech companies measures aspiring engineers by counting how many "Internet Drafts" and RFCs bear their names.) In general internet governance ought not to try to emulate the IETF. The IETF is a relatively objective technical world, a world in which goals and backgrounds of the participants are roughly aligned - and in which merit of solutions is, over time, somewhat measurable. In nearly every regard the world of internet governance is different - issues are more subjective, the goals of participants are often in complete opposition, and measures of merit are hard to come by. (BTW - for those of us interested in internet history, I think that the last TCP/IP "backoff" occurred in 1990 when we all met for a week in North Andover, Mass. at FTP Software and broke one another's software. And the replacement, the Interop show network because less a proving ground a more of a marketing network somewhere in the latter 1990's) --karl-- ____________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: governance at lists.igcaucus.org To be removed from the list, visit: http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing For all other list information and functions, see: http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see: http://www.igcaucus.org/ Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t 

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