[discuss] My current understanding of scope and why

Wed Jan 8 01:41:08 UTC 2014

I feel as if we somehow miss Thomas More among the 1NET members! 
Rebuilding Utopia all day long.

The internet is no more than a network like a road, water, or 
electric networks. I would really like to know what difference one 
could really make between the Internet Governance and the Road 
Governance. There are users, architects, engineers, governments, 
hackers/road hogs, NSA/Police, Cyber Command, Cavalry, international 
travel, visas, and national driving rules. Endianess and sides on the 
road. Speed limits and traffic loads. 2 and 4 wheels and trucks, 
mobiles, portable and mainframes, fog and clouds, etc. Govs have 
different laws, law enforcement, driver protection, etc. in the 
different countries. The road governance is probably more 
economically important and has the responsibility for more accidents, 
injuries, and deaths.

I feel that we could be far more efficient if we could keep the road 
metaphor in mind more often. Technology is about the way we can drive 
our packets/cars on the network/through the streets and highways and 
for how many miles per hour or per gallon. I am not sure that we 
would be so excited about the drivers' gender and human rights vs. 
traffic cops as we are about civil rights. There are false car plates 
and cyber squatters, plate number periodic changes and IPv4/v6 
transitions, etc. Sometimes on a road you have miles of dangerous 
bypasses to drive through just because of a missing bridge over a 
mountain river. On the internet, you are wasting days and years and 
exposing your data to spies because of the missing presentation layer

There are people who enjoy spending their day at the wheel and others 
at their keyboard, like us...
Why is that so?

Drivers enjoy showing off their luxury car.
We enjoy showing that we can exchange important mails
 like this one.

jfc

At 19:49 07/01/2014, Alejandro Pisanty wrote:
>Seth, Andrew,
>
>IMO you both have part of a point here.
>
>There is, if not a continuum, a fine grain gradation between issues 
>discussed as "Internet governance" that goes from those with a 
>strong technical content (from the issue itself to the locus of 
>decisions), such as technical standards for communications whose 
>locus is the IETF, to those involving far more non-technical factors 
>and for which the main locus of decisions is in higher layers (for 
>the present, the example of surveillance is fitting.)
>
>Issues like surveillance and the protection of rights against 
>surveillance depend on decisions that not only affect the Internet 
>but many other media and technologies, including pure meatspace 
>surveillance (is it legal and appropriate for an agent to follow you 
>on the street? to observe with whom you meet, for where, for how 
>long? - what is legal to do with this type of "metadata", clearly of 
>potential and painful value even if the agent does not listen to the 
>actual conversation?)
>
>A possible organizing principle for the Sao Paulo meeting would 
>emerge from this observation. As long as Internet governance 
>continues to be its subject, split it into groups of issues and 
>these into layers, and go a day per layer grouping. Most likely the 
>best result would come from an approach which goes from the upper to 
>the lower layers. Thus by the time you have to discuss changes in 
>technology (such as perpass), you'd already have some agreements 
>from the upper layers (do agents have to identify themselves before 
>listening? can they listen to foreign or only national 
>conversations?); the upper-layer discussions, of course, would be 
>infused by technical factors, opportunities and limitations.
>
>The debates in each layer would involve the stakeholders in 
>different ways, as in meatspace of course.
>
>Of course the meeting could decide to be non-duplicative of the IGF 
>and concentrate only on agreements about privacy and interference of 
>communications; and find a way to involve countries which more or 
>less have a legal framework for these activities and those who don't 
>(in writing and in actual practice.) I'm not holding my breath for this.
>
>Yours,
>
>Alejandro Pisanty
>
>
>On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:32 AM, Seth Johnson 
><<mailto:seth.p.johnson at gmail.com>seth.p.johnson at gmail.com> wrote:
>You'd do better to talk about the rest of my message.  The conception
>of distinguishing "more technical" at all, works as a misdirection
>that encourages people to think that one set of issues should be
>addressed in a new way, while what we've been doing heretofore
>ostensibly applies to "more technical" issues.  But it isn't the
>technical-or-not nature of the issues that's the problem.  It's that
>they seemed "more technical" because the context we had let us work
>that way.
>But you addressed the misguided concept of the problem, not the
>important point to make about the nature of the situation (a point which I
>clarified in a parenthetical note, to be sure).
>Also, *very* important (and especially as long as we keep acting like
>certain issues are distinct and require a special approach that's not
>so "more technical") is that it's not at all clear that "the Internet"
>is really the common denominator on this notional continuum/"connected
>spectrum."  There are clear signs that WSIS is not about that, but
>about other kinds of networks!  :-)
>
>Seth
>
>On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Andrew Sullivan 
><<mailto:ajs at anvilwalrusden.com>ajs at anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 10:05:36AM -0500, Seth Johnson wrote:
> >> I think it important to incorporate specific stipulation that a
> >> supposedly clear distinction between "more technical" and "other"
> >> categories of issues can't be treated as tenable.
> >
> > Well, yes, but I want to be careful not to fall into the bald man
> > fallacy[1] too (which is the other end of that same problem).  Lots of
> > people seem to believe that because, "How to we make sure IPv6
> > allocation is done neutrally and fairly?" and, "How do we tackle the
> > problem of international identity fraud and its implications for
> > banking systems?" are both Internet governance topics (according to
> > what we just said), therefore there's no important distinction to be
> > made.  That's just as false as, "There's a hard separation here."
> >
> > The point I was trying to make is that these issues lie along a
> > connected spectrum, having "the Internet" in common but possibly not
> > much else.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > A
> >
> > [1] For people unfamiliar: the bald man fallacy goes like this.
> > Consider a series of days: day n, day n+1, . . . day n+m.  On day n, I
> > am not bald.  On day n+1, did I lose enough hair to become bald?
> > Except in unusual medical circumstances or where I shaved my head, the
> > answer is "obviously not".  The fallacious conclusion is, "Therefore,
> > I will never be bald."  There is no moment in time at which I pass the
> > threshold from "hairy" to "bald", and yet there is surely a point at
> > which I become bald.  (That day is apparently approaching for me,
> > judging from my hairline.)
> >
> > --
> > Andrew Sullivan
> > <mailto:ajs at anvilwalrusden.com>ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > discuss mailing list
> > <mailto:discuss at 1net.org>discuss at 1net.org
> > http://1net.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>_______________________________________________
>discuss mailing list
><mailto:discuss at 1net.org>discuss at 1net.org
>http://1net.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>
>
>
>--
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>      Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
>Facultad de Química UNAM
>Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
>+52-1-5541444475 FROM ABROAD
>+525541444475 DESDE MÉXICO SMS +525541444475
>Blog: <http://pisanty.blogspot.com>http://pisanty.blogspot.com
>LinkedIn: 
><http://www.linkedin.com/in/pisanty>http://www.linkedin.com/in/pisanty
>Unete al grupo UNAM en LinkedIn, 
><http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/22285/4A106C0C8614>http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/22285/4A106C0C8614
>Twitter: <http://twitter.com/apisanty>http://twitter.com/apisanty
>---->> Unete a ISOC Mexico, <http://www.isoc.org>http://www.isoc.org
>.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
>_______________________________________________
>discuss mailing list
>discuss at 1net.org
>http://1net.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://1net-mail.1net.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20140108/2490df1a/attachment.html>