David, On 9/13/2012 3:25 PM, David Kessens wrote:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 03:10:51PM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:I believe we /do/ need a written policy that has been reviewed by legal counsel.I think the lengthy discussion that we have seen on this topic proofs that we should NOT have a written policy.
It shows a tendency of the active IETF discussants to resist doing the work of settling on policy for the IETF. That's quite different from demonstrating a lack of /need/.
Essentially none of the enlightened discussion on this thread considered legal ramifications of potentially arbitrary censorship by a public group such as ourselves.
In other words, I saw the /actual/ implication of the thread as making it crystal clear that we do /not/ want a collection of amateurs formulating ad hoc censorship policies on the fly.
(Forgive me for underscoring this, but I think the original policy draft that was floated to the community was a good demonstration of this danger. Although I happened to like the details of what was floated, the fact that it had not been reviewed by counsel prior to being made public is quite troubling.)
Deal with this on a case-by-case basis seems the most efficient way until we hear that the IESG spends more time arguing on a particular case than the IETF community does on a written policy.
For an organization in the business of writing global standards, we are remarkably resistant to doing the thoughtful and deliberate policy work of writing standards for ourselves.
Instead we tend to prefer the whimsy of personal adhoc-racy, with its typical dangers of inconsistency and incompleteness.
d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net