[discuss] [governance] Re: Comcast undertakes 9 year IETF cosponsorship!?

[Jefsey]

Dear Suresh,
I see the good response Jeremy made. I take back the full thread for 
it to be clearer.

>> > At 14:52 23/03/2014, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>> >> Fully agree. Which is why I am glad that  parminders views are 
>> still a tiny minority not shared by civil society in general.
>> > You phrased it very well in using "still" as he seems to 
>> represent a broad part of the informed still absentees.
>> > It would probably be advisable to consider Parminder's views are 
>> the people's common view, and find ways to show they are wrong at 
>> least in the future we foresee.
>> > I will take an example you know well: spam. Spam (as well as 
>> other cyber threats) partly comes from the Internet architectural 
>> choices making true origin complex to identify. These 
>> architectural choices are technical yet they affects the life and 
>> the purse of billion people.

>At 03:47 24/03/2014, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
>>On 24 Mar 2014, at 9:21 am, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> wrote:
>> > Because you are good enough to say that I know spam well .. I am 
>> sorry, how or why is the true origin of spam or any sort of email 
>> complex to identify?   At least from the perspective of a 
>> receiving mail system, there is the originating IP address, there 
>> are various authentication mechanisms (such as DMARC) which allow 
>> receiving systems to identify and flag / reject forged mail etc etc.
>
>What Jefsey's point may have been (not trying to put words into his 
>mouth, but this is my interpretation) is that one of the 
>characteristic faults of the technical community is that it is prone 
>to uncritically laud the Internet's architecture as being wholly 
>beneficial, neutral in terms of welfare distribution, and fully 
>supportive of democratic ideals (or worse, a substitute for 
>democratic ideals).  In reality the effects of those architectural 
>choices are very much more of a mixed bag, with some gains and some 
>losses, unequally distributed, and with limited accountability to 
>those affected by them.  So the simple example (perhaps) being given 
>is that is that spam is a problem that was enabled by the 
>architectural choices made by the Internet technical community, the 
>very same choices that also provide us with many positive benefits 
>such as resilience against censorship (but also other negatives such 
>as vulnerability to surveillance).

>On 24 Mar 2014, at 9:21 am, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> wrote
>The opinion of the common people, you say, favors exclusively 
>governmental funding and pushes for intergovernmental control (minus 
>the USA, ideally) of the Internet?  That would be strange 
>indeed.  And how many of the common people are informed enough on 
>igov to form their own opinion without falling for the first 
>inflammatory and poorly reported / slanted article they read on 
>either side of this debate?  What is being done to reach out to them?

I did not say common people. There is no need to reach out to those I 
discuss: the informed ones. These are the people I know because they 
send me mails as a facilitator for the  IUCG at IETF which has also the 
task to interface them with the IETF if they wishes. I must say that 
they are generally in agreement with the IAB evaluation of RFC 3869. 
Obviously I try to insist on the fact that non-commercial 
contributions the IAB ask for includes FLOSS, as I do. But I must say 
that FLOSS people are more interested in applications. Network lead 
users have not real time to spare to discuss standardization.

I suppose that the USG will now feel more free to propose a strategic 
global development plan for a new network technology, leaving the 
industry and ICANN to take care of the Internet layers? For example: 
in 2014 it is http://www.darpa.mil/cybergrandchallenge/, may be a new 
architecture for the digisphere in 2015?

jfc