Hi, I'm employed by the Internet Society but I'm responding to this in my personal capacity. On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 09:54:18AM -0600, Kyle Rose wrote: > I imagine there are few participants who would be in favor of privileged > access or powers given to governments: I certainly would be vehemently > opposed to any such change in our processes. I don't think that is the only thing going on in this report (though it's definitely a thing), and I think it is important to understand the other bit going on in order not to get in trouble from misunderstanding. (Also, we should be clear, this is not a UN report and AFAICT is in fact is just an independent contribution from two firms. If it had been submitted in the IETF, it would be an Internet Draft or maybe something published on the Independent Submission stream.) I have a number of deep reservations about that report and indeed the problem description it started with. But one of my concerns is what I think of as a mistaken view it has of "stakeholders" on the Internet. It basically has a demarcated-stakeholder model of how one participates in standards-making. This approach is not too dissimilar to the mechanisms ICANN uses for its participation: one is involved in the effort wearing one or more clear and distinct hat(s). This version of "multistakeholderism" is common among those who come from a fairly institutionalist background, and is probably natural for those from governments (where an important job is to assert power in one's sphere of influence, but where another important job is not to overstep the bounds). The IETF does not naturally work this way, which is part of why its institutional design _attends to_ the professional affiliations of people without counting them as officially significant most of the time. The IETF for that reason does not really have a "multistakeholder" design in the sense that people with a more institutionalist bent tend to think of it. The IETF standards mechanism, for instance, does not have an official way to acknowledge that there is a "legitimate role for governments" or other kinds of demarcations that are common to others' process designs. (To see how that demarcated-stakeholder assumption in action, have a look at essentially all of section 4 and section 5.4 of the resulting report.) Similarly, the report is somewhat mystified by its inability to get participation from "representatives of" the IETF. If one is going to engage with this report from an IETF perpective, it will be necessary to understand this basic gap in world-view that is hiding behind it. If one puts oneself in the position of someone who understands the world as fundamentally political processes with various kinds of officially-tokenized representatives (the stakeholders) involved in the process, then the report seems like a well-meaning attempte to incorporate standards for the monolithic into that process. It is only if you have a completely different understanding of what the Internet is and how it functions that the report seems to be tackling the wrong problem. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
