[governance] Digital restrictions management in HTML standards

[Norbert Bollow]

Catherine Roy <ecrire at catherine-roy.net> wrote:

> On 17/05/2013 9:19 AM, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > It may turn out to be impossible to effectively influence W3C's
> > decisions on this, but it certainly is possible to define a
> > "profile", i.e. a precise specification of the nice and large
> > subset of HTML5 which is acceptable from the perspective of people
> > who value freedom:
> >
> > http://FreedomHTML.org
> 
> Apologies for not responding sooner; I have been rather ill this week.

Ouch... I hope you're feeling better now, and I'm sending my best
wishes to get 100% well really soon.

> I think this is an intriguing idea and have subscribed to your
> mailing list and hope others do as well.

Thank you!

> I am relieved you are not proposing a fork

Of course not... I'm sure that everyone who has experience in
standardization will agree that when you want a subset of a spec that
exists or is being developed, you don't fork, you define a profile.

(Warning: Long democratization / human rights oriented rant ahead.) 

More importantly, standardization processes have always been
tech-driven and industry-driven. As tech standardization is becoming
important for governance of important aspects of society, we need to
think about how democratization of this governance aspect can be
achieved in general (as opposed to only addressing points of major
contention that could potentially drive a major fork.) I don't see it
as a realistic possibility for many non-technical stakeholders to
find an effective way in which they can participate in technical
standards development. Therefore, the tech-driven and industry-driven
bias is not going to go away. However I see it as realistically
possible to add a democratization layer on top of technical
standardization, in that profiles can be defined corresponding to
social and policy perspectives, thereby creating choices that are
meaningful not only to technical specialists but to everyone who has an
opinion on the relative importance of different policy objectives. For
example, what is more important, the movie industry (with its jobs and
profits and huge earning potential for the few superstars) or human
rights that are violated by “encrypted media extensions”? This isn't
really just a binary choice, there's a whole spectrum of choices for
what might be considered an appropriate balance between the interests
of marginalized individuals and marginalized communities (including in
particular the specific need of persons with disabilities) on one hand
and “content industry” business interests on the other hand. Eventually
there could be a whole series of precisely specified potential choices,
reflecting different levels of strictness of technical requirements on
websites in relation to invasive potential practices driven by business
interests of the content industry, privacy-invasive marketing oriented
business interests, etc. Then the processes of parliamentary democracy
can be used in each country to choose among these well-defined policy
options the one that is going to be made a requirement for business
websites and other widely used websites. Certainly all those websites
should really be accessible in order to allow persons with disabilities
to fully participate in online life. Governments may generally not
currently be very active in setting norms in this area, but according
to Article 9 of the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities,
they actually have an obligation to “take appropriate measures to
*ensure* (my emphasis) to persons with disabilities access, on an equal
basis with others, to... including information and communication
technologies...”.

Now, as the first step I'm proposing a profile to support the simple
binary choice between “FreedomHTML” and “HTML that may possibly contain
elements which are harmful to freedom principles”. I do not expect that
choice to be of great interest to many national parliaments. But I see
this as a kind of proof of concept for the idea of layering on top of
the tech-driven and industry-driven process for developing technical
specifications, a very different kind of process of promoting specific
profile choices on the basis of broader public interest concerns,
including in particular human rights concerns. 

> However, I still think, as I have stated previously, that an
> alternate proposal to the EME spec would go a long way to offering
> alternative solutions for those who need them. Someone (apologies, I
> do not remember who) mentioned earlier in this thread that a spec is
> a spec and still needs adoption. I would point out that EME is
> already in use even though it has barely made it to First Public
> Working Draft (but then, that has been the case with much of HTML5 as
> well). Currently, Chrome has preliminary support for EME, and
> Netflix, which relied on Silverlight in the past, is using it to
> power its current browser-based video player.
> 
> I am not pro-DRM, quite the contrary, and I do hope CSIGC rallies
> with others who have publicly deplored the W3C's advancement of EME,
> but I do not think it is going away any time soon. So perhaps your
> new forum can also contribute to proposing alternatives.

Let's discuss these thoughts on the FreedomHTML list, in a few days
(giving time to allow some more people to join the list before really
starting the debates).

> I would be happy to help publicize FreeHTML.org if you think that can
> be helpful.

Very very helpful - this initiative needs all the help of that type
that it can get! So thank you so much in advance.

Greetings,
Norbert

-- 
Recommendations for effective and constructive participation in IGC:
1. Respond to the content of assertions and arguments, not to the person
2. Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept

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