[governance] RE: FW: [liberationtech] Chinese preparing for a "Autonomous Internet" ?

Mon Jun 18 11:00:49 EDT 2012

Mike,

I fear you have made an unwarranted assumption here - "technical people seem to assume that all issues concerning the Internet will be determined by technical people on technical grounds."

Speaking for myself alone: no, not at all; what many of us do believe is that:

1.  you won't be able to apply just any given social/political view model to the technology without considering the constraints that the technology carries with it (the "physics" of the Internet). 

2. A lot of careful thought and decades of experience have gone into designing and implementing technology, so very often it has already been crafted in function of not purely technical concerns. The design for resilience of the root-zone server system is but one small example. People need to listen, study, and understand this well.

3. Many in the technical community were not only glad but actually proactive in seeking knowledge and understanding from such non-technical fields as economics, political science, and international relations. We have often been underwhelmed and disappointed.

Yours,

Alejandro Pisanty

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________________________________________
Desde: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] en nombre de michael gurstein [gurstein at gmail.com]
Enviado el: lunes, 18 de junio de 2012 09:45
Hasta: 'Stephane Bortzmeyer'; governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Asunto: [governance] RE: FW: [liberationtech] Chinese preparing for a  "Autonomous Internet" ?

One thing I've noticed in the course of these IG discussions is that while
technical people seem to assume that all issues concerning the Internet will
be determined by technical people on technical grounds, non-technical people
assume that non-technical issues (at least) will be determined by
non-technical (policy) people for whom the perception of the issue (and its
broader context) is very much more important than the reality or not of the
technical circumstances.

As per the below--identifying a particular argument/person/position as
"ignorant" may for technical people be understood as the end of the
argument--for non-technical people such an observation is rather the
beginning since it means that the other party, needs to be
informed/educated/persuaded/understood before one can move on.

To ignore or dismiss someone's position because they are "ignorant" (or
whatever) in non-technical areas (at least) is extremely dangerous since
without some intervention it is quite likely that they will act on the basis
of that "ignorance" with quite unpredictable and potentially extremely
damaging consequences.

M

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephane Bortzmeyer [mailto:bortzmeyer at internatif.org]
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2012 3:54 AM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; michael gurstein
Cc: lists at infosecurity.ch
Subject: Re: FW: [liberationtech] Chinese preparing for a "Autonomous
Internet" ?

> Even if we know that "root servers" are very well distributed across
> the world / countries trough a collaborative system, chinese see this
> as a "central control".

I'm always amazed by the amount of ignorance in some people in governance
discussions. Google's servers are "well distributed across the world", even
more than the DNS root name servers. Does it mean they are not centrally
controlled by Google?

The root zone can be modified (even for small technical changes) only when
there is an express approval by the US governement. Isn't it "central
control"? Pretending that the physical location of root name servers
diminishes this control is quite ridiculous.

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