[discuss] /1net Steering/Coordination Commitee

Sat Dec 21 18:39:24 UTC 2013

On 12/21/2013 06:28 PM, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <52B5B32C.2030802 at cs.tcd.ie>, at 15:26:36 on Sat, 21 Dec
> 2013, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell at cs.tcd.ie> writes
> 
>>> Quite a few people have been doing that for some time (myself, on and
>>> off, since 1999 for example).
>>
>> I didn't mean to imply it hadn't been tried. But I think results
>> so far are not yet a wild success
> 
> Depends what you mean by "wild success" I suppose. I can point to
> several legislative results which were vastly more acceptable to the
> Internet community after I'd persuaded the legislators how things
> actually worked.
> 
> One easily explained example is the way the EU's Copyright Directive
> exempts caches [mainly in the network, but local ones too] from
> requiring a licence from rightsholders. Such a state of affairs is taken
> for granted today, and I'm not saying someone else couldn't also have
> done that, but at the time I'm sure my own efforts (involving man-weeks
> if not months, of effort) were very likely what tipped the balance back
> in 2000/1.

But don't examples like that show that we've more to do if
we're not to have to fight each of those fights individually?

What I mean is that it'd be great if governments knew when to
start a discussion, with whom and how, and how to interpret
the dialog, and were happy that all of that was ok, before
going very far down the road with proposals with potentially
significant impact on the Internet. Maybe a bit too optimistic
to hope we could get there, but the discussion I've love to
see happen would be about how to get there (or closer).

Cheers,
S.