[governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes
parminder
parminder at itforchange.net
Thu Jan 26 05:39:23 EST 2012
On Thursday 26 January 2012 03:00 PM, Ian Peter wrote:
> Trouble is, Parminder, that with Microsoft's dominance of operating
> systems at that time (over 10 years ago), any spam solution without
> them on board was a waste of time.
>
> But the trouble also was, the spam solutions they were prepared to
> accept were also a waste of time...
>
> That's politics, and there are lots of examples of this sort of
> useless compromise to bring everyone on board in all areas of
> politics, both before and after and with or without multistakeholderism.
>
> My point is that pretending IETF is above politics is simply not true.
Ian, I do understand that you were pointing to a specific fact. My mail
was not directed against your views. I just took the opportunity to
reassert my issues with a certain kind of governance model... parminder
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From: *parminder <parminder at itforchange.net>
> *Reply-To: *<governance at lists.igcaucus.org>, parminder
> <parminder at itforchange.net>
> *Date: *Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:29:32 +0530
> *To: *<governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
> *Subject: *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 <karl at cavebear.com>
> <mailto:karl at cavebear.com>
> Reply-To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
> <mailto:governance at lists.igcaucus.org> , Karl Auerbach
> <karl at cavebear.com> <mailto:karl at cavebear.com>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:48:50 -0800
> To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
> <mailto:governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
> 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--
>
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>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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