> Ted Hardie wrote: > On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Tony Hain <alh-ietf@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Like it or not, governments are fundamentally opposed to the open nature of > 'the Internet', and they always will be (even the 'reasonable' ones). > Managing information flow is how they derive and exercise power > > Aside from the whole "consent of the governed" issue, this perspective seems > historically fairly short-sighted. And that consent is based on information availability. Manage the information, and you manage the consent. > ... > Yes, there were treaty-based efforts to set some common > understandings. Some of those were quite useful, but whenever they actually > impinged on workings of the real network you got smuggling. In some cases, lots > and lots of it, with encouragement from some of the participating nations. In > other words, some countries tried to control their participants in these > international networks very tightly. Some were content to let their merchants > get fat off it instead. There was no universal response. Shipping Merchant / Harbor Master == ISP : As you see with the resolution signatories, there is still no universal response. > ... > In this new effort at a multilateral framework, we are seeing a clash between a > desire for sovereign control of the Internet and a desire to reap the benefits of > open participation. I think our role in that is to make sure all involved > understand: the benefits of the Internet's network effect; the risks in allowing > nations through which traffic passes to assert sovereignty over the flows, As if professional information control practitioners do not understand the risks of information control at a much deeper level than anyone in the IETF could ever hope to ... > especially given both the pace and chance of topological change; and the reality > that entities outside of governments control the paths that packets actual > traverse. The entities that operate and control the paths do so at the pleasure of the governments, just as the merchants and harbor masters did in your example above. As long as governments are pleased, the operators can live in a fantasy land where they are outside government control. The Dubai discussions show what happens when a collection of governments are no longer pleased ... If that noise level gets high enough the non-signers will have to respond just to maintain some degree of cooperation on other matters they care about. Our role is to recognize that there are much bigger issues than the simple process of bit delivery. Yes bit delivery is important, and dynamic, but it is equivalent to laying the tracks. Standards must be maintained for consistent interworking, but it is not the path that matters; just as with rail cars, it is the content that provides the value. Being highly dynamic makes things harder to control, but not impossible. Even in the 'open' countries, a few changes in something as apparently disconnected as tax laws would dramatically change the decisions and behaviors of the operators that are 'outside of government control'. > ... > Patrik Fältström wrote: > On 4 jan 2013, at 01:59, Tony Hain <alh-ietf@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Like it or not, governments are fundamentally opposed to the open > > nature of 'the Internet', and they always will be (even the 'reasonable' ones). > > Because I do not think generalization is really a reasonable thing to do, and even > dangerous when discussing governance issues, I disagree with this statement. I agree there is danger here, but I believe the greater danger is embodied in this thread due to the lack of acknowledgement that governments always have control, even if the control points are not obvious. > > Governments want just like businesses success in whatever they do. That can in > general be divided in two wishes. Short term, in the form of being re-elected (or > not thrown out of their office) and long term, as in growth of the revenue of the > country they govern. The second point (restated as 'prosperity for their constituency') is really just a continuation of the first point. > > They of course have pieces of their operation that belong to law enforcement > agencies, but they also have those that are responsible of finding rules so that > non-public sector can grow (to later increase for example tax revenue). > > Because of this, I encourage people to not generalize per stakeholder group, but > instead acknowledge that there are different *forces* that are orthogonal to > each other, and calculating "the correct" balance between them is hard. Or > rather, different people do for different reasons get different results when > calculating what the for them proper balance is. > > That is why I personally am against generalization that a stakeholder group have > one specific view. I would agree that they all demonstrate a different calculation for the importance of various aspects of controlling information flow. My primary point here is that the IETF has to accept this as a reality. So far the position has been 'this is the technology, & governments need to adapt'. At the end of the day though, it is the governments that are really in control, and if the IETF does not want a 'forced adaptation', it need to evolve and listen to the needs of a stakeholder group they have tried hard to ignore. > > Specifically governments. > > If when pushed to be forced to choose between two choices *all* governments > wanted to have control, we would have had many more governments signing the > proposed treaty that was on the table in Dubai. > > Instead, when being forced to choose, they picked openness and multi > stakeholder bottom up processes. As noted above, this is due to relative happiness, and limited noise. If the noise level grows or they become unhappy, the independence of the standards process is a minor pawn in the game, and will be sacrificed to protect something more important. > ... Tony