[Chapter-delegates] ISOC open letter

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 11:53:43AM +0200, Richard Hill via Chapter-delegates wrote:

>Well, this is a matter of interpreting and applying the Internet Way of
>Networking. And in any case, I think that it would be of interest to the
>Chapters to be made aware of what the staff is doing before it is actually
>done.

There are two possible interpretations to this, and I'm wondering which you mean.  The first is that you think Chapters might want to know these details in advance so that they can have input to the course of action.  The second is that Chapters might want to know detailed plans of action because they're curious, but do not expect to have any influence on the action.

>I agree that in some cases a very short deadline would be required. But it
>seems to me that, in this case, a one-week notice would have been feasible.

Regardless of how it seems to you, it was not.  My understanding is that this effort came together over a couple days, and was influenced in part by the realities of committee meeting dates and so forth.

>That may or may not be the case. There might be people living outside Canada
>that follow Canadian matters. And there might be people who might comment on
>the general issue raised.

Sure.  And all of that is still possible, as this very conversation reveals.

>As I've said before, the Internet Way of Networking appears to me to apply
>mainly to infrastructure

I know you have said this, and I think I have asked what you mean by "infrastructure".  The basic problem with that line of argument is that it suggests, without quite saying, that there is a bright line where one can say, "This is not infrastructure."  But that turns out to be false, because of the way the Internet encourages encapsulation and component re-use.

The basic trouble here is that the idea of tidy "layers" (often somehow derived from the OSI model) is really a fiction.  From very early on, infrastructure was found in the application layer -- DNS is clearly an application even though virtually nothing else works without it.  Is quic a transport or application-layer technology?  In some sense, it's both and neither.  And of course, huge chunks of the Internet (not just the Web) depend on authentication services that are deeply embedded in certain social medial platforms.

>Regarding the issue at hand, if some company uses the Internet to provide
>what is in effect a broadcast service, then it might make sense to regulate
>that service just like any other broadcast service.

It might, if the tidy category "broadcast" would stay still.  But it doesn't, and efforts by the Government of Canada to fix these boundaries are as likely as not to require network and network-services operators to impose (in Canada's case, even more) arbitrary sludge on the network in an effort to conform with poorly-conceived directives from a regulator that doesn't always seem to have a solid grasp of the nature of the Internet.  

>> The only practical ways anyone has been able to understand most of the
>> provisions (and they're not all in the bill, because a number of the
>> rules would actually have to be made up by the CRTC after the bill
>> became law) involves mucking with the operation of networks themselves
>> in order to implement the goals.
>
>Could you be more precise? What sort of "mucking"?

Network service providers who are subject to fines if something contrary to a regulation happens inevitably make the thing at least hard to do in the network.  This kind of activity implicitly turns the Internet from a general-purpose technology to one directed at specific purposes, and increases complexity as a result.  Obvious examples include various DNS-based filters that get deployed and the ubiquitous use of geolocation for service-provision determination.

>>This problem got a lot worse with an
>> amendment that was introduced by the Minister in committee (so the first
>> reading version online doesn't contain it yet).
>
>Where can I find that amendment?

You'd have to look through the minutes from committee, I believe, which I think appear in Hansard (but I'm relying on memory here as to process).

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
President & CEO, Internet Society
sullivan at isoc.org
+1 416 731 1261