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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D">Eliot (love your domain name, btw):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:windowtext">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:windowtext"> Eliot Lear [mailto:lear@ofcourseimright.com]
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">></span>Since you asked the question, tho, turnabout is fair play ;-) I'd be curious of your thoughts about this.<br>
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<span style="color:#1F497D">What you described in your response were forms of governmental _<i>participation</i>_ in IETF standardization activities. I think that’s fine, as long as governments participate on the basis of individuals with expertise and an ability
to contribute something of value to the development of protocols and standards. I am completely opposed to any situation in which governments participate as “overseers” of standardization processes, or any process to require technological designs to “conform
to policy.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">Behind my view is a more academically derived argument about the ‘code is law’ line. In certain naïve manifestations, the belief that code is law or that protocols have politics can lead to a misplaced belief
that if we design standards and architecture right then we will have no social problems. We can have, for example, “privacy by design,” or “freedom in a box” regardless of powerful political and economic forces pushing in the opposite direction. The reality
is that standards and technology can be, and often are, overcome or distorted by politics and economics, and – most importantly – that you can rarely predict the actual social impact of a technology when it is just in the early design stages. In practical
effect, political oversight of design will be inherently conservative; had there been “oversight” of the development of the Internet standards, for example, the telephone companies and governments would have designed them to protect vested interests in the
control of communications. Disruptive technologies occur precisely because no one understands their ultimate societal impact and/or no one in established authority has any say about it.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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