[ih] A paper

[Bob Purvy]

Also Andrew:

I'm not sure what to call that kind of organizational decision other than
"political".


This is what someone who is not a practicing engineer would say:
"everything is political."

No, Andrew, some people just want to get the job done.

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 4:57 PM vinton cerf via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Andrew: 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".
>
> Vint: huh? I thought that was good engineering!
>
> v
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 5:24 PM Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> > [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
> > --
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> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >
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