Re: Request for community guidance on issue concerning a future meeting of the IETF

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On Sep 18, 2009, at 11:24 AM, Ben Campbell wrote:



Finally, do you think that, in this group of people, there won't be at least one who cannot resist stating their opinions about some political hot button? Or for that matter, figure out they can DoS the entire IETF by throwing up a controversial slide. Obviously there's some wiggle-room in the "within the control of the client" clause--but that's the sort of thing that gets worked out in courts later. It's not very helpful when the on-site authorities have already pulled the plug, and I don't expect them to be sympathetic to the idea that the IETF cannot control the behavior of it's participants.


You are absolutely right.

I might find a little political speech tempting, and can assure you that there would be a number of other people with pithy political comments to make.

Perhaps something like "Free Tibet and Taiwan, Celebrate Falan Gong, Porn is a Human Right", as a footer on every slide? After all, we have no rules about political speech. If the IETF tried to move to suppress such discourse, we could well be sued back in the States.

I can certainly imagine people with agendae using this as an opportunity to score massive publicity by getting the IETF shut down or even better arranging for mass arrests and/or related civil disobedience on a large scale. It might even be a good thing, but it would be better if we weren't caught in the middle of it. Or maybe I'm wrong; perhaps the best service we can give the world is to be made examples of in China.

There are other risks as well. It wasn't too long ago that the Mexican government had to send a plane to retrieve many of the Mexican citizens in the country, after PRC health authorities decided to put them all into a rather primitive extended quarantine (read "concentration/death camp"). Given the IETF's penchant for outbreaks of respiratory diseases (the "IETF cold/flu" that frequently gets around), I'd not like to have that happen to us. I was doing standards work and we were scheduled to meet in Guangdong during the SARS outbreak, and remember television scenes of hospitals fenced in with barbed wire, with the afflicted being fork-lifted over the fence to die, as all supplies in the hospitals had supposedly been exhausted and water and electricity cut off to "prevent spread". Not that any country would do all that well in such a situation, but the People's Republic of China has a proven track record of being rather scary, at least from a western point of view.

See:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8033089.stm

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124137876507580987.html

http://www.salisburypost.com/Lifestyle/082109-quarantined-in-china

So all in all, I'd say I'm not comfortable with the idea of an IETF meeting in the PRC at this time. Maybe, in a few years, if they open up their Internet and cut back on the human rights abuses associated with the users of our technology (making bloggers "disappear" is just NOT acceptable), then we'll be ready to meet there. But not now, not yet.

--
Dean
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