On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Eric Rescorla wrote: > So, this isn't really that useful context for the rest of the > paragraph. To take the example of encryption, I think people > were arguing that it was a topic "regarding human rights". > > With that said, it's not clear to me that saying "China's policy > of censoring the Internet sucks" isn't defamation. I would say that this DOES border on defamation, BUT I am at a loss to understand why such a statement would be a required part of our technical discussion. The statement is an opinion about a topic which there is a lot more that can be said, but like the baby said "this isn't the venue." (Let's just say that it isn't well understood in the west). "X policy sucks" sound like politics and not technology particularly if X is a country. If on the other hand you were to say: "I am upset about the way provider Y in country X does aggregation in BGP because this degrades performance of..." you would have little to worry about beyond perhaps a technical argument. I managed to shame a certain provider in India into fixing their issue after they showed up as "most unstable AS" for a number of months, and they ended up thanking me for it in the end after considerable finger pointing. > > I'll rephrase my question then: > Is your claim that you believe that the contract would not be > found in a court of law to cover the described activities? > If by "activities" you mean "technical discussions" that are a normal part of any IETF meeting, then yes. If, on the other hand, you mean using the IETF as a platform to publically criticize the host country, then I would say we are needlessly pushing the envelope. (I don't a court would really enter into it, but that's another matter). Ole _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf