Re: IAB Statement on Encryption and Mandatory Client-side Scanning of Content

[Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 19, 2023, at 08:50, Andrew Alston - IETF <andrew-ietf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

>>  I am okay if a government makes open
>> source illegal to disable that open source feature.

You may be – I am not – because the consequences of banning opensource would be directly detrimental to the Internet and its development.  It would prevent running code implementations to test standards, it would harm the development community, and it would do endless amounts of damage.  So – while you are free to hold that opinion, I can’t in good faith sit here and say that I think that making opensource illegal wouldn’t be utterly insane – entirely unworkable – and massively detrimental to the Internet at large

And on top of that, the PGP lawsuit in the US in the 90’s already showed that opensource code is the equivalent of free speech, so making opensource illegal constitutes making freedom of speech illegal.

Additionally, since people in other countries can legally write such modified opensource software, you would additionally need to ban all software (opensource or not) that doesn’t have the backdoor/government reporting/filtering code. How would endusers even know this ? Eg they download chrome or Firefox and now they are a criminal ?

Saying you approve of banning opensource is at best an unwise recommendation. And if one believes the IAB shouldn’t make statements touching politics, I guess this counter statement fulfills all the same checkboxes for being inappropriate coming from our community ? It’s a ….. paradox ?

Paul