[discuss] /1net Steering/Coordination Commitee

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 10:36:40AM +0000, Mawaki Chango wrote:
> coordination committee. Their choice seems to narrow even more the
> stakeholder boundaries. So blaming this on the stakeholder model and silos
> does work for solving that.

That begs the question.  It's only narrowing if one takes seriously
the categories that we're using -- categories that are, I claim, both
artificial and constricting.
 
> 2. Do the proponents of the "do stuff, structure later" approach really
> have a clear idea of the "stuff" that we are called to do here? 

No, and I have no evidence of any kind that creating a large,
unrepresentative committee selected mysteriously from ill-defined
stakeholder groups is going to clarify.

> 3. Modeling the "do stuff, structure later" (DSSL) approach on its use in
> the early days of the internet begs the question - how well has that
> worked? A handful number of engineers, aware of each other's expertise and
> trusting each other, loosely making decisions for a network of a limited
> number of small networks which they only envisioned to serve a tight
> community of researchers is one thing. Agreeing on decisions or seeking
> consensus for decisions that will shape a truly global network of an
> indefinite number of networks may be another.

This is an intriguing argument, but I think deeply mistaken both on
the facts and on the implications.  To answer the first question: it
appears to have worked pretty well.  AT&T engineers reputedly said
that packet switching would never work; now most phone calls travel
over IP.  While it is true that the early network was small and its
users were almost all also its designers, the famous slogan
"everything over IP" does not suggest the early engineers were
thinking small.  And it seems to me that agreeing on decisions or
seeking consensus for decisions among a group with little claim to
legitimacy is at least as contentious as anything else is likely to
be, if that group pretends to be shaping the Internet.  Indeed, I
suspect that such illegitimacy simply plays into the hands of those
who would like only national governments to be speaking.

> So did the model you're proposing work that well, still at this global
> level we are now?

I have no idea; but the appearance of self-dealing that plagues
ICANN's decisions -- even when those decisions are the right ones --
is surely something that should make us think twice about rigid
categories of "stakeholders", especially when we end up with
stakeholder groups as narrow in population as the business group just
named.

> 5. In themselves, those problems have been around before Snowden
> revelations. 

I'm not entirely sure what "those problems" are you're talking about
here.  But the pervasive surveillance problem was always an
acknowledged threat in IETF circles, and it was always dismissed as
too impractical to be bothered with.  Perfect security is, of course,
impossible, and so security analyses are a trade-off.  The IETF
meeting in Vancouver was notable partly because the IETF seems to have
agreed that its former threat analysis was wrong, and that attacks
that were long considered fantasies turn out to be real.  At the same
time, I have to say that the security properties of IETF protocols
turn out to be pretty competitive with those turned out by narrow,
top-down, closed industry consortia: think of the various SIM security
failures, the lousy security of chip-and-pin, or the hopeless
inadequacies of different DVD security systems.

> It is not yet the actual "stuff" to be done.

Fundamentally, I think this is my problem.  The claim is that this is
so completely unimportant that nobody should be worried about the
constitution of the committee.  Ok, in that case, why have a committee
at all?  In my experience, this sort of bureaucratic arrangement is
excellent at preserving the prerogatives of entrenched interests, but
not actually that good at putting themselves out of business.

Anyway, I'll shut up now.  If other people want to organize themselves
into a committee, I'm certainly not going to stand in the way.  I just
wish to be clear that no such committee represents me, in any of my
various community roles.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com