[ih] A paper

[Andrew Sullivan]

[I think I sent this earlier from the wrong address.  Apologies for any duplicates.]

Dear colleagues,

In the sprit of full disclosure, I will note both that I work for the
organization that hosts this list but I'm speaking for myself, and
also that I have a personal relationship with one of the authors of
the paper that has caused so much discussion.  But I have an
observation.  

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 08:37:32AM -0700, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote:
>I would hope after all that, especially Jack and Vint and Andrew's awesome
>summaries, you will just withdraw the paper.

I think that would be a shame, because I think the paper is making a
point that some on this list seem to be missing, but that is extremely
important for anything pretending to be an Interhet _history_ list,
rather than just Internet recollections.

In a previous career, I thought I was going to be an academic, and
I knew a lot of historians because I worked on what was then called
history and philosophy of science and technology (I think the jargon
is now "science and technology studies").  Young historians working on
the 1960s and 1970s kept having trouble publishing papers because
they'd submit to a journal and get back a review that said in effect,
"That's not what happened, because I was _there_."

Now, the problem with our past selves is that we can't interview them.
We can only interview our present selves, who have all the
retrospective knowledge and story-telling about what we did _then_ and
what it meant.  That isn't to say such interviews and recollections
are not valuable, but they're also not documentary evidence.  And that
is I think an important point that is related to something the paper
is arguing.

Regardless of what people doing engineering think, there are a lot of
people today who believe the Internet needs plenty of regulation, and
who have become convinced that the Internet is (or maybe I should say
"is only") a political instrument.  This is one interpretation of
Laura DeNardis's slogan, "Protocols are politics by other means."
(For whatever it's worth, I think that interpretation doesn't hold up
to a close reading of DeNardis's original text, but I have not noticed
that popular discourse is much affected by close readings.)  The
Badiei-Fidler paper is making the point that such a claim is poorly
justified given the history of several protocols, and that indeed the
historical record doesn't make it plain that the people designing
things _themselves_ had perfectly clear interpretations of what they
were doing at the time.  I don't know about you, but my experience has
been that I often only really know where I am going after I get
there.  This is in part because it is the effort of doing the work
that reveals what compromises need to be made in a technology.

Indeed, as several have pointed out in this thread, that was one basic
problem behind the OSI approach: it appeared to want a
fully-worked-out design that "everyone" could agree on before anything
could be built and shipped, and the result was that the Internet
people shipped first, and so that's what took over.  And it must be
admitted, I think, that there is something at least partly political
in such a decision: one approach valued Officially Approved Agreement
and controlled distribution of documents over getting working things
in the hands of those trying to make stuff work.  The Internet
approach instead was to try things in the open and share documents
as widely as possible.  I'm not sure what to call that kind of
organizational decision other than "political".

Yet, as Badiei and Fidler argue, there's no _inherent_ politics that
is legible in any particular protocol.  To move from, "Some Internet
protocols have politics built in," or even, "There is a fundamentally
political decision in any organizational form," to, "All protocols are
inherently political and must be designed to promote certain kinds of
values," is hard to square with the history of several protocols as
documented in the historical record.  That might not be surprising to
people on this list, who problably didn't think they were practicing
politics by other means when designing the networks.  But I think
Badiei and Fidler are trying to make that case to scholars in other
fields, who are busy interpreting the history that many here lived in
a way that might not be good for the future of innovation on the
Internet.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com