20190608 IAB Mail exchange on the "End User" Draft : Différence entre versions

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:Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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:vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com  
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:'''Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange'''
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:Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
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:'''vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com '''
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:'''Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy'''
  
 
:You may remember that I already sent extensive feedback, mostly critical, when -07 was released and the same question was asked. I can say that after that, and after I had a chance to discuss this in person with an IAB member, the following versions have become noticeably better, so thanks for this.
 
:You may remember that I already sent extensive feedback, mostly critical, when -07 was released and the same question was asked. I can say that after that, and after I had a chance to discuss this in person with an IAB member, the following versions have become noticeably better, so thanks for this.
  
 
:I will still state a few points for the IAB to consider when making its mind on whether to adopt this draft, and on how to develop it further.
 
:I will still state a few points for the IAB to consider when making its mind on whether to adopt this draft, and on how to develop it further.
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:1. Whose interest is it really?
 
:1. Whose interest is it really?
  
 
:If this is going to be a high level policy declaration of "we do it for the general public interest", i.e. the interest of "the people" in general, this is a positive thing. However, you have to be absolutely sure that this will never be used as a way to push the standards-making process in a direction that benefits certain companies over others.
 
:If this is going to be a high level policy declaration of "we do it for the general public interest", i.e. the interest of "the people" in general, this is a positive thing. However, you have to be absolutely sure that this will never be used as a way to push the standards-making process in a direction that benefits certain companies over others.
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:Especially, there is a decade-long competitive battle ongoing between companies providing services within the network and companies providing services over the network, at the endpoints of the connections. Sometimes the "end user" interest can be aligned with the former, sometimes with the latter, and sometimes (perhaps the most likely case) with neither of the two. The IETF should never make policy choices meant to be in favour of any of the two sets of businesses, but only in favour of the actual end users.
 
:Especially, there is a decade-long competitive battle ongoing between companies providing services within the network and companies providing services over the network, at the endpoints of the connections. Sometimes the "end user" interest can be aligned with the former, sometimes with the latter, and sometimes (perhaps the most likely case) with neither of the two. The IETF should never make policy choices meant to be in favour of any of the two sets of businesses, but only in favour of the actual end users.
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:Even from the theoretical point of view, when individual "end users" form an organization, be it an NGO, a business or a government, the organization they form - which starts to have interests of its own - is not, in policy terms, an "end user" any more, even if it sits at the edge of the network. This is a known difference between the policy and the technology realm and should be made very clear in the conceptualization of this document.  
 
:Even from the theoretical point of view, when individual "end users" form an organization, be it an NGO, a business or a government, the organization they form - which starts to have interests of its own - is not, in policy terms, an "end user" any more, even if it sits at the edge of the network. This is a known difference between the policy and the technology realm and should be made very clear in the conceptualization of this document.  
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:2. Easy to say, hard to do  
 
:2. Easy to say, hard to do  
  
 
:The second issue is that the controversial part when doing something "in the interest of the people" is not the principle statement, but how to determine what the interest of the people actually is.  
 
:The second issue is that the controversial part when doing something "in the interest of the people" is not the principle statement, but how to determine what the interest of the people actually is.  
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:Currently, the IETF is spectacularly ill equipped for that, and the draft does not seem to address the problem, apart from a generic invitation to reach out to civil society organizations and other stakeholders, which however also generally do not represent the interest of "end users", but at most of subsets of them (e.g. the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation are going to give you opposite advice on what is in the general public interest and "for social good", though both are civil society organizations). Again, the problem is not how to get multiple end-user interests stated, but how to decide which ones are to prevail, which is always a subjective judgement by each participant, and needs to be aggregated "fairly".
 
:Currently, the IETF is spectacularly ill equipped for that, and the draft does not seem to address the problem, apart from a generic invitation to reach out to civil society organizations and other stakeholders, which however also generally do not represent the interest of "end users", but at most of subsets of them (e.g. the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation are going to give you opposite advice on what is in the general public interest and "for social good", though both are civil society organizations). Again, the problem is not how to get multiple end-user interests stated, but how to decide which ones are to prevail, which is always a subjective judgement by each participant, and needs to be aggregated "fairly".
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:Mankind has worked for centuries to build complex institutional arrangements to get to determine "what's best for the people", and at least for a couple of decades to build similar arrangements specifically for the Internet. Yet there is no indication of their role in this document - it looks like, all of a sudden, the IETF (even at the individual WG level) is going to make its own policy decisions, alone, after running its own consultations with stakeholders. This looks unreliable, unaccountable, uncooperative, and unlikely to bring to any valid result.
 
:Mankind has worked for centuries to build complex institutional arrangements to get to determine "what's best for the people", and at least for a couple of decades to build similar arrangements specifically for the Internet. Yet there is no indication of their role in this document - it looks like, all of a sudden, the IETF (even at the individual WG level) is going to make its own policy decisions, alone, after running its own consultations with stakeholders. This looks unreliable, unaccountable, uncooperative, and unlikely to bring to any valid result.
  
 
:In the end, if the IETF is going to adopt this policy, I would suggest that it should also have some ideas on how to implement it and on how it would fit into the broader Internet governance institutional galaxy.
 
:In the end, if the IETF is going to adopt this policy, I would suggest that it should also have some ideas on how to implement it and on how it would fit into the broader Internet governance institutional galaxy.
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:3. This is not (common) law
 
:3. This is not (common) law
  
 
:The draft seems to imply that the IETF is building a corpus of principle documents that are to be used as a binding reference to put an end to any doubt on how to apply the main guideline - basically, a "constitution" of the IETF. The draft actually lists RFC7754, RFC7258, RFC7624 and others.
 
:The draft seems to imply that the IETF is building a corpus of principle documents that are to be used as a binding reference to put an end to any doubt on how to apply the main guideline - basically, a "constitution" of the IETF. The draft actually lists RFC7754, RFC7258, RFC7624 and others.
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:I sincerely doubt that the policy realm in which we are working is so clear, static and globally uniform that you can express such broader principles and apply them at any time and in any circumstance without further thought. Actually, I think that you need to do the opposite - start with a tentative guideline, see if it actually works in practice, be ready to adapt it to changing circumstances or to new information that shows you that what you thought would work nicely is actually creating more problems than it solves, or conflicts with one of the other guidelines.
 
:I sincerely doubt that the policy realm in which we are working is so clear, static and globally uniform that you can express such broader principles and apply them at any time and in any circumstance without further thought. Actually, I think that you need to do the opposite - start with a tentative guideline, see if it actually works in practice, be ready to adapt it to changing circumstances or to new information that shows you that what you thought would work nicely is actually creating more problems than it solves, or conflicts with one of the other guidelines.
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:And if you still want to establish policy guidelines for protocol development, I think you need to set specifically high barriers for developing them. You must be really sure that they represent broad policy consensus that goes well beyond a small number of IAB or WG members, and - as they affect the whole Internet - beyond the IETF itself.
 
:And if you still want to establish policy guidelines for protocol development, I think you need to set specifically high barriers for developing them. You must be really sure that they represent broad policy consensus that goes well beyond a small number of IAB or WG members, and - as they affect the whole Internet - beyond the IETF itself.
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:This is just a set of personal opinions, building on scarce IETF experience but a long personal history in Internet policy; I hope it can contribute usefully to the discussion and I will be happy to continue if the IAB decides to adopt this document.
 
:This is just a set of personal opinions, building on scarce IETF experience but a long personal history in Internet policy; I hope it can contribute usefully to the discussion and I will be happy to continue if the IAB decides to adopt this document.
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Version du 23 juillet 2019 à 14:52


(Please note that some typos have been corrected) This debate is in relation with the IAB Adoption of [ draft-nottingham-for-the-users]

At 18:07 08/06/2019, JFC Morfin wrote:


At 16:02 07/06/2019, John C Klensin wrote:
I've looked through this document and, while I'm sympathetic to several of the concerns that have been raised (both recently and in March), I see a far more fundamental, quasi-procedural, problem.


John,
I've also looked through your response and, while I'm sympathetic to the concern you have raised that (as I understand it) might affect the pertinence of an IAB document on the matter, I am concerned in a far more fundamental, quasi-architectonical, problem I don't know if it could not, in turn, affect your concern.



An important part of the IAB's role is to give architectural advice to the IETF and the Internet community more generally.


My concern is architectonical, i.e., before any architectural issue but at the same time post-architectural. I explain: since October 1st, 2016 I consider the cyberspace to be freed from what I perceived as its 1986 de-facto innovation "internet-moratorium" that out-lawed my job, as Director, Tymnet/Extended Services.
Note:
Extended services are network services extending data transport to data processing on the fly (what [networked] OPESes could partly do). They were in opposition to the deregulation pre-requisite that transport and treatment would be separated businesses. That was to prevent cross-subsidization: at that pre-Mama Bell divestiture time, Telcos feared that Tymshare, GE, and their likes, could use cloud/time-sharing revenues to competitively cross-subsidize data transport). In addition XS can also involve the "mneme" (i.e. the present network of past traces that make the possible of something into its future, an Ampère concept that delineates the person, the impact of an event, a culture, an active repository, the contexture of the context).
Customers were Visa, Banks, TWA and airlines, etc.
Please note the term "customers" that, in turn, could service internal and external users, processes and stand-alone operations. The "end-user" in Mark Nottingham's vision can be an autonomous bot. The European Parliament has voted a demand to the Government Council to come with a legislation on this issue. In 1986 they were not ready to do so, but my deparment (and "my" PTTs) were :-) !.


Since 2016 I came back to the less internet constrained cyberspace, I tried to protect the/our future at the IETF (e.g., the langtag issue – that categorize linguistic agoras (open user classes and host groups)).
To better illustrate/make understand this, I found a deeply discussed clear explanation in the XVIIe century debate over sovereignty and state, something that rules our lives, and we are actually resuming here.
The fundamental thinkers are Machiavelli (identified multitude), Bodin (identified sovereignty) and Hobbes (identified people and the modern state we still currently live under). The Hobbes' perspective (1642) is that humanity was able to copy the art of God in creating a huge artificial and fictive man: State. Whose soul is sovereignty. That artificially fictive man/state was, in turn, able to create "the people" from the multitude of people.
Quotes detailing the reasons why are:
  • "one can not say that an action made in a multitude of assembled people is the action of the multitude."
  • "It turns out that the multitude is not unity and remains a summation of atomic units while the people are the retroactive outcome of the establishment of sovereignty-one."
  • "The citizens, when they rebel against the State, are the multitude against the people."
This means that Lincoln’s "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth" is something Mark Nottingham does not rule out but want to update.
For a very simple reason: up to now we only knew a hierarchical way to build peoples, in assembling bottom-people/end-users. Now we have to introduce and document a new horizontal one: networking. And because the IETF is documenting concepts that "have little to do with the technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that we choose to create" (RFC 3539) that "allow new networking technology to be introduced into the existing catenet while remaining functionally compatible with existing systems" (IEN 48).
And what the network technology introduce in human organigrams is people to people, pair to pair relations; and multistakeholdership. For a bunch of reasons because "the Internet is a global phenomenon. The people interested in its evolution are from every culture (including not geeks) under the sun and from all walks of life." (RFC 3935). There are no more end-users; everyone is a "core-user" of his own networking. None may know the expertise of all the others in their various networking perspectives: some bring their knowledge about technology, others about UX, others about SX (social expertise), others about semiotic multilinguistic, others about what their discipline or their surviving, or their strategy or their art expect from their networking. The internet is about ID (interdisciplinarity).
This is what the internet designers of a "large, heterogeneous collection of interconnected systems that can be used for communication [and processings from my extended services pov.] of many different types between any interested parties connected to it" (RFC 3935) must first consider. This is what the IAB has to discover for them, document to them and make sure they accept; because the inter-RFC 6852 global community technical compatibility has to be dealt through the IAB.



The value and acceptance of that advice rests solely on its quality, the quality of the explanations given for it, and, to some degree, on the professional reputations of IAB members. The main thrust of the post-Kobe POISED reforms was to deprive the IAB of any procedural authority for its architectural advice and to more clearly shift responsibility for determining IETF consensus to the IESG.


Correct. But read what Brian Carpenter and others say. They refer to their time vision of the end to end internet, so this is correct for them to speak about end-users the way they do. OSI designers (Louis Pouzin's team) were about the network to networks since 1974 (as was Vint Cerf since 1978, who was calling for an end to end able to evoluate, what the "status-quo" 1986 freeze prevented). Myself, as Tymnet, I am about agoras to agoras (whatever how many CPUs they may count from one to billions).



This document explains what the IETF does and how it makes (and should make) decisions. Such a statement should represent, and will be assumed to represent, IETF Consensus ... at least unless we have reached the point where IETF strategy is dictated top-down (and, even then, the IAB has not been the "top" for descriptions of the IETF since the IETF was merely an IAB Task Force). In recent years, the IAB has published various documents, workshop reports, and other positions with precisely the justification that it is not a consensus body and need new restrict itself to areas were IETF consensus has been, or could easily be, demonstrated. I believe that it a correct position: if the IAB is going to offer forward-looking architectural advice, it must be able to get ahead of the community and then persuade others to adopt its positions. But the IAB cannot have it both ways, both asserting that it can publish documents without IETF consensus and publishing documents that describe the beliefs of, or set strategy for, the IETF


RFC 6852 got rid of that. The IETF is part of a broad standardization collusion embracing "a modern paradigm for standards where the economics of global markets, fueled by technological advancements, drive global deployment of standards regardless of their formal status. In this paradigm, standards support interoperability, foster global competition, are developed through an open participatory process, and are voluntarily adopted globally. These voluntary standards serve as building blocks for products and services targeted at meeting the needs of the market and consumer, thereby driving innovation. Innovation, in turn, contributes to the creation of new markets and the growth and expansion of existing markets."
Except that this collusion does not make sense if it does not extends to every market and therefore to every consumer who in turn is a producer. This is why there only are core-users co-standardizers of "every venue under the sun."



The value and acceptance of that advice rests solely on its quality, the quality of the explanations given for it, and, to some degree, on the professional reputations of IAB members. The main thrust of the post-Kobe POISED reforms was to deprive the IAB of any procedural authority for its architectural advice and to more clearly shift responsibility for determining IETF consensus to the IESG.


Except that, IMHO, it has not fully understood the impact of RFC 6852, if I judge from its responses to my appeals and this debate. This is why I explained that I would only consider the "catenet" layers that the internet infrastructure was able to provide me as an interconnected user ("IUser") and build my own "global community" technology over it.
As such, I am considering "sets of agoras of agoras" using the no-presentation layer "network of network". Either the IETF is neutral or favorable to me when it does help or does not endanger my informed use of its layers. It is a pain when it plans otherwise. The solution I found was the iucg@ietf.org mailing list, not for the internet users, but for the IETF users (also IUsers). Unfortunately, this list is not much active, but I would be glad transferring it to Mark Nottingham as I have much sympathy as an involved user ("IUser") in many of his points.



I believe that it a correct position: if the IAB is going to offer forward-looking architectural advice, it must be able to get ahead of the community and then persuade others to adopt its positions. But the IAB cannot have it both ways, both asserting that it can publish documents without IETF consensus and publishing documents that describe the beliefs of, or set strategy for, the IETF.


Correct!!! The IAB in this situation is in the position to offer forward-looking architectural advice about the way 2020 reading of IETF previous engagements means (so they might amend them).



This document should not be adopted by the IAB in its present form. It should either be rewritten to clearly be a description of the IAB's opinion about how the IETF should behave (in which case there is the risk that no one will care), or the IAB should propose an IRTF BOF and then a WG to consider these issues, possibly with the intention of revising or updating RFC 3935.
Various questions, including those about the definition of "end user", aside, I am basically in favor of the point this I-D is trying to make. But my opinion is nor more (or less) a guarantee of IETF consensus than Mark's opinion or that of the IAB. I do have to confess that I'm a bit surprised that the IESG --which, after all, has two representatives on the IAB-- has not raised this issue.


IMHO the real question is ontological. What is the internet for who? That has become a matter that spans the entire philosophical, technological, political, economical, etc. spectrum. Because these disciplines are discussing points, they first qualify as philosophical objects, technological issues, political subjects, economic matters, etc. and that diktyological (diktyology is the name of the network discipline) spans them all.



best,
john
p.s. We seem to have a mini-trend of late that involves using Informational documents to clarify, supplement, or implicitly update IETF Standards and BCPs without being extremely clear about their status and relationship to authoritative IETF consensus statements and documents. I think it is very troublesome and that the community should start pushing back against it even if our leadership bodies are unwilling to do so (er even facilitating such documents).


IMHO again - this is a matter I work on for 40 years since introducing the INTLFILE that grandfathered the root file - we are dealing here with interlinked ("everything is interconnected") issues from a too limited point of view. The IAB comes from the four layers of TCP/IP. Even CCITT’s OSI 7 layers did not fulfill the job (but dramatically simplifies it with layer six, presentation). The "Tymnet/Extended Systems" with its 12+ layers helped better, But the "+" (presentation layer uniform space) is the field for interdisciplinary investigation.
Now, is everything blocked?
No. Because of Brian Carpenter RFC 1958 architectural PLUS (not the same +, the one I started to check as internet compatible at the WG/IDNA2008 - "plugged layers on the user side", continuing the network model on the receiving fringe) solution.
The RFC 3935 states: "The network's job is to transmit datagrams as efficiently and flexibly as possible. Everything else should be done at the fringes."
  • This is what everyone expects from IETF and what IAB should help it to achieve.
  • The fringe to fringe IUser can then take over and use the internet end-to-end datagrams as his intersem fringe-to-fringe intelligrams.
This is OK with me so far. Except that I am working on low civil society "no-budget" and I am slow at developing my intersem architecture over the internet catenet.
I hope this may help.
Best
jfc



Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
You may remember that I already sent extensive feedback, mostly critical, when -07 was released and the same question was asked. I can say that after that, and after I had a chance to discuss this in person with an IAB member, the following versions have become noticeably better, so thanks for this.
I will still state a few points for the IAB to consider when making its mind on whether to adopt this draft, and on how to develop it further.


x

1. Whose interest is it really?
If this is going to be a high level policy declaration of "we do it for the general public interest", i.e. the interest of "the people" in general, this is a positive thing. However, you have to be absolutely sure that this will never be used as a way to push the standards-making process in a direction that benefits certain companies over others.


x

Especially, there is a decade-long competitive battle ongoing between companies providing services within the network and companies providing services over the network, at the endpoints of the connections. Sometimes the "end user" interest can be aligned with the former, sometimes with the latter, and sometimes (perhaps the most likely case) with neither of the two. The IETF should never make policy choices meant to be in favour of any of the two sets of businesses, but only in favour of the actual end users.


x

Even from the theoretical point of view, when individual "end users" form an organization, be it an NGO, a business or a government, the organization they form - which starts to have interests of its own - is not, in policy terms, an "end user" any more, even if it sits at the edge of the network. This is a known difference between the policy and the technology realm and should be made very clear in the conceptualization of this document.


x

2. Easy to say, hard to do
The second issue is that the controversial part when doing something "in the interest of the people" is not the principle statement, but how to determine what the interest of the people actually is.


x

Currently, the IETF is spectacularly ill equipped for that, and the draft does not seem to address the problem, apart from a generic invitation to reach out to civil society organizations and other stakeholders, which however also generally do not represent the interest of "end users", but at most of subsets of them (e.g. the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation are going to give you opposite advice on what is in the general public interest and "for social good", though both are civil society organizations). Again, the problem is not how to get multiple end-user interests stated, but how to decide which ones are to prevail, which is always a subjective judgement by each participant, and needs to be aggregated "fairly".


x

Mankind has worked for centuries to build complex institutional arrangements to get to determine "what's best for the people", and at least for a couple of decades to build similar arrangements specifically for the Internet. Yet there is no indication of their role in this document - it looks like, all of a sudden, the IETF (even at the individual WG level) is going to make its own policy decisions, alone, after running its own consultations with stakeholders. This looks unreliable, unaccountable, uncooperative, and unlikely to bring to any valid result.
In the end, if the IETF is going to adopt this policy, I would suggest that it should also have some ideas on how to implement it and on how it would fit into the broader Internet governance institutional galaxy.


x

3. This is not (common) law
The draft seems to imply that the IETF is building a corpus of principle documents that are to be used as a binding reference to put an end to any doubt on how to apply the main guideline - basically, a "constitution" of the IETF. The draft actually lists RFC7754, RFC7258, RFC7624 and others.


x

I sincerely doubt that the policy realm in which we are working is so clear, static and globally uniform that you can express such broader principles and apply them at any time and in any circumstance without further thought. Actually, I think that you need to do the opposite - start with a tentative guideline, see if it actually works in practice, be ready to adapt it to changing circumstances or to new information that shows you that what you thought would work nicely is actually creating more problems than it solves, or conflicts with one of the other guidelines.


x

And if you still want to establish policy guidelines for protocol development, I think you need to set specifically high barriers for developing them. You must be really sure that they represent broad policy consensus that goes well beyond a small number of IAB or WG members, and - as they affect the whole Internet - beyond the IETF itself.


x

This is just a set of personal opinions, building on scarce IETF experience but a long personal history in Internet policy; I hope it can contribute usefully to the discussion and I will be happy to continue if the IAB decides to adopt this document.



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