[ih] A paper

[Darius Kazemi]

Most of you probably don't know me. I'm an engineer by trade and amateur
historian for kicks. I spend a lot of time acting as a kind of translator
of technology history for people who work as engineers today, because I
don't want my colleagues to repeat the mistakes of the past and would
rather they learn from its successes. I spend a lot of time reading old
RFCs and other documents from the 60s-80s because I'd rather learn from
your hard earned wisdom than shoot myself in the foot when I'm working on
decentralized protocols and applications. (I'm currently devouring
Padlipsky's 1985 "Elements of Networking Style", a political document if
there ever was one.)

Anyhow, I'd like to chime in and say:

1) thank you to Andrew Sullivan for writing most of what I was planning to
spend a good hour composing for this list tonight

2) I often describe a protocol as "an agreement between parties about the
way things are expected to be done". A protocol that no one agrees to use
is dead in the water, as you all know. I don't believe etymology is
deterministic but it is interesting to note that the word "protocol"
literally derives from politics, specifically that of diplomatic protocol!
Regardless, it is difficult for me to envision an agreement between parties
as anything but political. I'll note that I don't mean political in the
sense of campaigns and government spending. I mean it in the broad sense of
humans organizing to do things. I think some of the misunderstanding here
is that we are working off different definitions of "political".

3) It seems the paper has been misread by a number of people on the list
(though correctly read by others who have provided fair criticism). It is
specifically arguing that you can't bake human rights values into protocol
design. The absolute meat of the paper is in its last two sentences, which
I think most people here would completely agree with:

> Focusing solely on [Internet protocol] developers and encouraging them to
consider human rights does not help to create a human rights–enabling
environment on the Internet. Imposing lofty political considerations on the
activities of protocol designers politicizes the act of creating protocols
that do not necessarily have a political dimension.

It really feels like some of you saw the word "politics", saw that this was
written by people who aren't engineers, and assumed they were coming from a
position antagonistic to yours. If anything, this paper is highly
antagonistic to the over-politicization of technology! That you personally
cannot read the article and parse it isn't anyone's fault, for the same
reason that you can't expect a nontechnical person to read RFC 114 and make
heads or tails of it.

Anyway it's been pretty frustrating to see everyone talking at cross
purposes when I think folks are mostly aligned! And then we could have
productive discussions about the context of specific claims in the paper.

-Darius

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 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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