Subject: Re: [hrpc] Freedom of Association on the Internet

From: Gisela Perez de Acha <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 22:59:11 -0600

Hey everyone,

First of all thank you very much for all your responses. I apologize
that it took me so long to reply, but the comments deserved a thoughtful
response, and some time to read and write.

Before I go any further, let me remind you all that our new version -03
is online https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tenoever-hrpc-association-03

We made an initial mistake: it's an assembly, not an association,
precisely because of the ephemeral nature of the internet (taken as a
social pact as well). I will mix literal quotes from the past emails
that we've shared. Sorry if it's a bit long, but I'd rather read
everything all together. It helps me not lose track of mailing lists

1) Niels wrote
"Not completely, right? There are rules ASes need to abide by to be able
to receive an ASN. That is the bare minimum.Next to that other. ASes
also need to _want_ to peer with you, else you're still not connected.
So there are pre-conditions. Including use of IP. So there are simple
rules that ASes need to abide by to join the Internet."

## My questions for him are the following (and I hope everyone feels
free to jump in as well)
* What are those rules? Who made them? Is there a central authority?
* Would the IP actually precondition anything in terms of rights?

2) Andrew wrote:

"If you join a semi-public conversation in a bus, you have to speak that
vernacular, not creep people out, and so on.  Also, you need to want to
participate, which presumes that you are getting something out of it.
Do you have a _right_ to join the conversation?  I rather hope not, or
else I rather hope that the meaning of "right" is considerably weaker
than it seems to be in contemporary socio-political discourse."

## I have read a bunch of your responses together, and I think we are
coming back to the discussion of what is public. On may 2017 I wrote
(Full email here)
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=hrpc&qdr=y&so=date

## _____There's many definitions of "public": 1) the one that derives
from governmental power [a.k.a. monopoly of the legitimate use of
violence]; 2) goods and services that are non-rival and non-exclusive,
like some "public services"; 3) a "sphere" or space where citizenship
can discuss things outside of governmental reach (a public sphere
itself). This is important, because you CAN protest at a mall without
being kicked out. Even though it's a "private space" it becomes a
"public sphere" because of potential broad interactions. How can we talk
about this at the infrastructure level?______

## We haven't gone back to that in the -03 draft, but this makes me
think we could go deeper and explore the obligations of "private" ASes
vis-á-vis the internet: a broader "public service"? That's why I'm
intrigued about verbalizing what I previously wrote on question 1). More
of Andrew's arguments below:

"I still don't understand how any of that responds to the main point I
was making.  The draft as it stands appears to me to conjure into being
the requirement that any given AS -- or maybe only some ASes, I am not
sure -- MUST route the packets of (some?) other ASes as a matter of the
right of association.  This strikes me as the sort of massive elevation
of political preference to "a right" that underpins Bentham's original
description of natural rights.  I simply do not see how anything in the
Internet architecutre allows someone to insist on the right of free
packet passage.  I really _want_ that passage, and think it is an
unalloyed good thing.  But I do not see why (and the draft provides, as
far as I can tell, zero argument for why) this is a "right" as opposed
to the collectively self-interested way by which everyone gets a global
Internet.

3) There's another point about human rights binding states but not
private entities directly if I'm correct, right? Andrew said:

Andrew said: "Since, as you point out, there can be no forced
association because of association being a freedom, then it cannot
possibly be the case that I can be forced to carry the traffic of
someone on my network. But if my network is a critical path between two
people who want to associate on the Internet, then their right of
freedom of association and my right not to associate with one of them
are necessarily in conflict.  In this case, I don't actually see what it
gains us to claim that there is a right to associate freely on the
Internet, since as a practical matter such a right is _always_ in
conflict with the right of someone else not to so associate.  So either
this claim of a right is empty, or else it imbalances the scale towards
individuals' rights to associate with one another at the expense of
private operators' rights not to so participate.

## YES! Exactly, that's what we meant when we first started discussing
this. THAT'S the leap we have to make. For a greater "public service"
you have to obey certain obligations, even if you are a "private AS"

4) About the Bolivian law:

Bortzmeyer wrote: "About the issue of "mandatory peering" (not a good
term, but I'm too lazy to find a better one), HRPC participants may be
interested by the bolivian law of 2011
<https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-L-N164.xhtml> "Artículo 50.
(INTERCONEXIÓN ENTRE PROVEEDORES DE INTERNET). Los proveedores de
internet, deben obligatoriamente establecer y aceptar interconexiones
entre sí, dentro del territorio nacional, a través de un punto de
intercambio de tráfico, a fin de cursar el tráfico de internet, de
acuerdo a las condiciones establecidas mediante reglamento." I translate
it very roughly "Article 50 (interconnection of Internet access
providers). Internet access providers MUST set up interconnections
between them, inside the country, through an Internet exchange point, to
exchange Internet traffic. The precise conditions will be described in a
regulation." [AFAIK, this regulation is being drafted currently.]

## It makes me think of "common carriage" provisions for
telecommunication companies. For McChesney, when the Internet was
privatised around 1992, telephone and cable television companies that
owned the Internet's physical infrastructure figured that the best way
to avoid losing their market share was to charge for the use or
"interconnection" was to rent them out. In 1992, US law required these
companies to comply with common carriage provisions: that they not
charge other service providers for the use of their cables to connect to
the Internet. I haven't checked again Wu's first paper on net
neutrality, but I believe something of the sort could be found
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863
## This law from 2012 specifies the 2011 one from Bolivia
https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-RE-DSN1391.xhtml (am I missing
something) It specifies the internet is a "public service" (a lot of the
current net neutrality battles center around that: if it's a mere
information service, common carriage provisions do not apply). What is
interesting is the very specific regulation that stems from this. Almost
treating ISPs like "public broadcasters"
## It also seems that the government gives out licences to operate
private networks, but considers the internet a public service, therefore
forces certain ISPs to give connection. It even specifies mandatory
"interconection with networks that use voice over IP" (I swear that's
what the law says, artícle 95).
## While I type this, I wonder if we could net neutrality out. Could it
be net neutrality that binds ASes so that the broader Internet as a
"public service" can work? Is it relevant to think this in terms of
right to association?

Anyways, thanks again. Happy to keep this moving forward :)

Cheers

Gisela

El 2/23/18 a las 9:38 AM, Andrew Sullivan escribió:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 02:59:35PM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>>
>> About the issue of "mandatory peering" (not a good term, but I'm too
>> lazy to find a better one), HRPC participants may be interested by the
>> bolivian law of 2011 <https://www.lexivox.org/norms/BO-L-N164.xhtml>
> 
> I think the example is an interesting one.  The danger from a
> technical point of view, of course, is that the Internet could be
> transformed into a country-based catanet if everyone did this.
> 
>> Before evaluating this law, remember that Bolivia is the poorest
>> country in Latin America and, outside OECD countries, the default
>> behavior of IAP is to interconnect outside of the country.
> 
> There are indeed good arguments for why to do it in that case.  But
> many regulatory regimes have good arguments behind them, but in
> practice turn out to have technical consequences people didn't
> understand and that they find undesirable.
> 
> And of course none of this addresses the question of whether there are
> rights involved here.  It does appear to suggest that, in Bolivia, you
> give up your right of disassociation from others if you want to carry
> traffic on behalf of some other set of others.  Without a lot of
> study, it's hard to say whether such an arrangement is good for the
> Internet in Boliva, and I doubt I am qualified to do such a study
> because of how weak my knowledge of local language and markets is.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> A
>

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2018 07:56:54 -0400

Inline. I'm not going through your entire email (breakfast and the activities of the day prevent that), but I'll make a few comments.

> * Would the IP actually precondition anything in terms of rights?

The rules are technical in nature, as the term is a technical term used in routing and in the description of the design of the Internet. The earliest document that I find that uses the term 'Autonomous System' and discusses rules by that name is RFC 820, which in turn refers to RFC 827. RFC 827 is a description of EGP, a predecessor protocol to BGP. The "rules" in the EGP design are, first, a description of the early ARPANET - a central core to which some number of "autonomous systems" are connected using an Internet Message Processor (IMP), and the assignment of a 16 bit AS number to such systems for purposes of identification. Such networks use IPv4 and ICMP to communicate.

The "central authority" in a technical protocol design is the designer of the protocol. In this case, there are a very few important people, but the "designer" is probably best defined as the early technical community, as the protocols grew out of discussions among the community.

> intrigued about verbalizing what I previously wrote on question 1).

In the Internet, I would expect that the concepts in RFCs 7258 and 7624 apply to the context of a conversation on a bus. One does not have the right to "join" a conversation whose participants do not intend to include it. That might be called "eavesdropping", and in these RFCs is referred to as "surveillance".

> More
> packet passage.

I would agree with that, but suspect that there are some inferences that at least some are drawing that don't follow. Consider this highly-simplified picture:

     ,-----.           ,-----.          ,-----.
    / My AS \         /       \        /Your AS\
   (         )+------( Transit )------(         )
    \  Me   /`.       \ AS #1 /        \  You  /
     `-----'   `.      `--+--'          `-----'
                 `.       |
                   `.  ,--+--.
                     `/Transit\
     ,---------.    /(  AS #2  )\     ,---------.
   ,'Other AS #1`. /  \       /  \ ,-'Other AS #2`-.
  (               )    `-----'    (                 )
   `.  Party A  ,'                 `-.   Party B ,-'
     `---------'                      `---------'

You'll note in this that there are six AS's, two of which are labelled as "Transit". Any AS offers the service of enabling parties within it to communicate with some set of parties outside of it. That doesn't imply "all parties", and doesn't imply "as a right"; it implies that there are acceptable parties, and it is done as a service. That service may or may not be a natural part of things (a company would offer such a service to its employees as a matter of doing business, but for residential services, the subscriber would pay the company for the service, for example). So "My AS" would offer "Me" the service of interconnection with "You" and "Your AS" - not as a right, but as a service, and as a practical matter. It may or may not also provide connectivity to parties A and B and to their AS's.

A Transit AS does the same for parties within it, but additionally offers the service of connecting to and carrying traffic for AS's and parties that are not communicating exclusively with it. Note that Transit AS's are not required to have connection to other AS's per se, but as a practical matter probably do - it's a matter of doing business in offering their service. They may or may not additionally have transitive services to AS's that they don't directly connect to via other Transit AS's. In this graphic, "My AS" has a choice of two transit AS's, but the others each connect to only one. Some of the communication paths in the graphic are indirect through only one transit AS, but interconnection between "You" and "Party B" requires a path through two transit AS's.

So in no case is this a matter of right; it is a matter of service, and that service may be one that someone pays for.

> I really _want_ that passage, and think it is an

At least in the Internet, it is not a right.

---

From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2018 18:07:51 +0100

Hi all,

Inline:

> * What are those rules? Who made them? Is there a central authority?

I'd say that these rules are made by the RIRs, they define what is
needed to be able to receive a ASN and block(s) or IP addresses.

> * Would the IP actually precondition anything in terms of rights?

Well, you need to live up to certain preconditions, so yes:

https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-management/supporting-notes-for-internet-address-space-request-forms

> about this at the infrastructure level?______

Interesting, do you have some links to original sources for point 3 ? I
think that is exactly what we're looking for.

> to the collectively self-interested way by which everyone gets a global

If passing packets is a 'good thing', and the world would be worse of if
we didn't do it, and doing the good thing actually facilitates human
rights, and not doing it hampers them, can we not say it should be an
obligation?

> someone on my network.

I disagree. Because the network itself is already associated  through
the use of IP, having an ASN, etc.

 But if my network is a critical path between two
> are necessarily in conflict.  

I do not think the intermediate would necessarily be part of the
association of the two.

> In this case, I don't actually see what it

So the argument would be: if you subscribe to be part of the
association, you should facilitate assembly/association among members of
the association.

> treating ISPs like "public broadcasters"

Interesting, but also potentially dangerous since then you would be
touching on content as well.

> ## While I type this, I wonder if we could net neutrality out.

Not sure what this means.

> Could it
> "public service" can work? 

Sure, but probably it could even be done without net neutrality. Mixing
it in might not make our discussion easier.

> Is it relevant to think this in terms of
> right to association?
> 

Cheers,

Niels

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