[ih] A paper

Sun Jul 18 17:24:47 PDT 2021

thanks for pointing out that last bit, Darius.
v

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 8:17 PM Darius Kazemi via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
> > > --
> > > Internet-history mailing list
> > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > >
> > --
> > Internet-history mailing list
> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >
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>

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