IETF WAS Re: [governance] Enhanced Cooperation (was Re: reality check on economics)

[Roland Perry]

In message <2E0295FA5E2E40E2BD39297EBF6F760D at UserVAIO>, at 04:41:09 on 
Wed, 23 May 2012, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> writes
>Without at this point a preference for models of decision making in the area
>of EC...
>
>For the sake of argument let's take your description of the IETF process
>"absolute openness of participation, rough consensus, and deferring
>decision-making about draft standards until several members of the group
>have hands-on experience with implementation and interoperability testing
>for the draft specifications" and let's do a thought experiment applying it
>to an area of potential EC policy making such as say "Net Neutrality" could
>you or anyone explain how the process you have described above might lead to
>a generally acceptable (and usable) outcome?

That's the kind of exercise that the OECD undertakes (for example their 
recent study of Internet Intermediaries). The secretariat looks at 
what's been implemented in various different jurisdictions, the 
membership examines, edits and approves the report, which is then 
available for policy makers to draw conclusions from.

No doubt it would be possible to have a look at a topic such as NN from 
the point of view "of what has worked and what hasn't", then perhaps 
recommend that more regulators adopt the "does work" than the "doesn't".

However, there are a number of problems with this, not least of which is 
that people don't even agree what NN is, and local [eg commercial/ 
monopoly/network capacity] circumstances differ a lot from one country 
to another.

Whereas "delivering an IP packet" is a fairly well understood concept, 
and happens much the same inside routers in one country as another. 
(That's not to say it's any easier, but at least there's a high degree 
of agreement about what you are trying to achieve and the type of 
equipment used to do that).

To take a telephony example (which are ITU standards rather than IETF, 
which although a less transparent process, is otherwise very similar) 
the reasons why there is not de-facto worldwide NN for VoIP traffic are 
not generally technical (eg: I can't figure out how to get the packets 
through my NAT router) but are political and commercial, and refer to 
matters such as Revenue Abstraction from conventional telephony, access 
by Law Enforcement, and users becoming "Bandwidth Hogs" on mobile 
broadband which was sold to them on the assumption of occasional web 
browsing, not regular videophone use.

Another analogy: the alcohol equivalent of the IETF can design a 
reliable test for the percentage content in a glass of beer, but is it 
their role to decide who can drink that beer, where and when, and in 
what quantity?
-- 
Roland Perry

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