Subject: [hrpc] Freedom of Association on the Internet

From: avri doria <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 12:15:27 -0500

Re: draft-tenoever-hrpc-association-02
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-tenoever-hrpc-association/>

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-tenoever-hrpc-association/

Questions:

- Is the doc is ready to be a RG doc

- Does the doc contain issues that are still too controversial for the
group consensus for inclusion at the moment. Please be specific.

- Who is interested in working on it

- Are the authors willing to give up change control

- What remains to be be done on this?

---

From: Gisela Perez de Acha <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 18:05:44 -0600

Hi. I will respond inline
> - Is the doc is ready to be a RG doc

I believe it is. Not because it is already done, but because it is an
interesting thing, with a promising approach, and most of all, people
are working on it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Farrell and
Bortzmeyer have expressed in this mailing list the possibility for it to
be an RG document as well.

> group consensus for inclusion at the moment. Please be specific.

Yes, we are currently working on the argument of the "Internet as an
association" and the section regarding "spam and filter bubbles" so it
reflects what the group really thinks.

> - Who is interested in working on it

Me :)

Anyone else?

Are the authors willing to give up change control

I cannot make this decisions unilaterally, I would be fine, but let's
ask Niels as well.

> - What remains to be be done on this?

Clean, edit and add all the comments.

Cheers

Gisela
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> hrpc mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc
>

---

From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 11:52:07 +0100

Hi,

Inline for me too:

> be an RG document as well.

I think it is ready too. It has been discussed extensively at several meetings and on the list and is in pretty good shape.
> reflects what the group really thinks.

Even though we are indeed working on these revision in response to the comments at last meeting and on the list afterwards, I don't think this should stop document adoption.

> > - Who is interested in working on it

Me

> I cannot make this decisions unilaterally, I would be fine, but let's

Happy to do so.
 
> Clean, edit and add all the comments.

Indeed.

Best,

Niels

-- 

Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital

Article 19
www.article19.org

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                   643A 0ED8 3F3A 468A C8B3

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 15:01:54 -0900

On 1/23/18 1:52 AM, Niels ten Oever wrote:
> I think it is ready too. It has been discussed extensively at several
> meetings and on the list and is in pretty good shape.

Well ...

Overall I think the document is reasonable except for section 7,
which is sufficiently incorrect that I don't think document can be
adopted as-is.

It is absolutely true that the internet enables association, that
association is a human right, and that it must be protected.  It does
not follow at all that network have association rights which must be
protected.  I really don't know how many times techies have to
repeat this before it's reflected in the document.  I think it's
correct and appropriate to talk about ways in which disruptions to
connectivity can affect the freedom to associate but I am completely
unclear why that means that a given network has a right to expect
transport from another network.  I think there needs to be a distinction
between the tools that are used to enable rights and the rights
themselves, and that's not reflected in the document as it currently
stands.  (or as we might say, "this is a layer violation").

So basically I think it would be helpful if sections 6.4 and 7 were
replaced with a discussion of ways in which network disruptions can
interfere with the right to freely associate.

Melinda

-- 
Software longa, hardware brevis

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---

From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 13:41:25 +0100

Hi Melinda,

Thanks a lot for this. Reply in-line:

> which is sufficiently incorrect that I don't think document can be

Happy to discuss, hope that the topic is sufficiently interesting to work on and therefore merits consideration to become RG doc. 
 
> protected.  

section 7. says: 

   This means that
   rights and obligations that sterm from this organizational form,
   should also be protected and respected.

So I don't think this section says that as 'network has rights', except when you would interpret 'the network' as a combination of users and the (different layers of) technology. The section argues that because networks are so interconnected with freedom of association we need to think how this should be protected on the network level, and thinking of the Internet as an assembly itself could help with that. 

What is complicated here is that of course the Internet is a network of networks, so how does the right of self-determination of one AS relate to the ability of users to associate. That is the tension that this section aims to touch upon. 

> I really don't know how many times techies have to
> repeat this before it's reflected in the document. 

I think one of the problems is that tech is never just tech, but that tech is always socio-technical. We cannot think the tech without its use(r)s.

> I think it's
> transport from another network. 

Interesting. I think we're actually we're actually agreeing. But I am not sure whether 'disruptions' would fully capture it, because that implies ad hoc or temporary hiccup in data flow. 

In other words: what can users expect while they associate on the Internet, and what are the implications for ASes of these expectations?

> I think there needs to be a distinction

But the users (who are always the rights holders), do need the Internet to associate. This brings about obligations for the network. When users use the Internet to associate, it is also the Internet that should be protected. 
 
> interfere with the right to freely associate.

I think the argument we're developing here (and I fully agree the argument is not finished, therefore we really need your brainpower), goes further than disruptions. It it touches on the question of how to build a public space on private infrastructure.

Happy to discuss, and I hope this helps.

Best,

Niels

-- 

Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
Datactive Research Group
University of Amsterdam

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 14:45:56 -0500

Hi,

> I think one of the problems is that tech is never just tech, but that tech is always socio-technical. We cannot think the tech without its use(r)s.

As I think may have been made clear before, not everyone agrees with
that assertion; and even if one does, the limits of the application of
such agreement may be different for different people.  That means that
the premise is (again) doing too much work in the argument, and it is
a premise that itself needs rather more support than it has.  That may
be a discussion of another draft, however ;-)

> But the users (who are always the rights holders), do need the Internet to associate. This brings about obligations for the network. When users use the Internet to associate, it is also the Interne…

The point that I think Melinda is making, and that I have certainly
already tried to make before, is that this use of "the Internet" is
missing what the Internet is.  "The Internet" is a noun more like "the
traffic" than "the table": a mass rather than count noun.[1] These two
examples are emergent things made up of many other kinds of
behaviour, each contributing to but not making up the whole.

On the Internet, the emergence is (partially) because of individuable
networks -- "Autonomous Systems" -- that each voluntarily participate
in the network of networks to make the Internet.  But there's an
important caveat: each network is operated exclusively by its
operators, and participates for locally-defined benefit according to
locally-defined needs and desires.

In the meat-world, your freedom of association does not extend so far
as to require me to associate with you: it's a negative, not a
positive, right.  If the Internet is made up entirely of ASes
participating freely with one another, and if each AS's participation
is defined according to locally-defined needs and desires, then it
follows that it is _impossible_ to "protect" the Internet in terms of
users' associational abilities.  For that would create a positive
obligation on participating ASes out of a negative right on the part
of any given user.  And since at a low level there is nothing
signified by "the Internet" except the emergent behaviour of those
independent ASes (and other networks that could be ASes but aren't
yet), there is no other thing to protect and no other obligation that
can accrue.
 
> I think the argument we're developing here … touches on the question
> of how to build a public space on private infrastructure.

It does rather more than touch on this.  To make that argument work
_at all_, you are either going to need to make some other kind of
argument:

    • Claim that there is a social need that trumps the private nature
      of the participating ASes.

    • Work in somehow the always-tricky issue of collective rights and
      obligations without individual obligation.

    • Define into existence some new network of last resort that has
      the positive obligation to carry traffic when nobody else does.

    • Define "the Internet" to be something other than the emergent
      propery of those individual networks participating voluntarily,
      and explain what that is.

As it stands, I do not think the draft makes any attempt to do any of
those, and I think that may be the core problem.

In addition, I don't know how you do any of these without make a
pretty strong distinction between "network operator" and "everyone
else", where "everyone else" is going to include very large network
operators that have an AS and do routing selectively.  But, of course,
we already _had_ a network that had those properties.  It was the
telephone network, with rights, obligations, and roles carefully
delineated by regulations and government-granted monopoly rights.  We
can observe some of that in, for instance, the "last mile" networks in
many places.  But I am pretty far from convinced that any right to
freedom of association would be made more operative by reinventing the
legal and regulatory regime that made possible telco monopolies the
world over; or by revivifying the bureaucratic,
government-and-insiders-only nature of international telegraphy
treaties.  The lowest-level Internet infrastructure operations club is
undoubtedly hard to join, and the club certainly doesn't accept that
others have a right of association. It is still worlds easier to join
than the club of governments, whose members are even more hostile to
new applicants.

Best regards,

A

[1] That is not to say that "internet" is a mass noun.  You can have
two internets.  But all the internets are the Internet, and if you add
more internets you still have one Internet.

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 12:23:44 +0100

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 02:45:56PM -0500,
 Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 87 lines which said:

> "The Internet" is a noun more like "the traffic" than "the table": a
> mass rather than count noun.[1] These two examples are emergent
> things made up of many other kinds of behaviour, each contributing
> to but not making up the whole.

Nice explanations. I tend to agree, but:

> But there's an important caveat: each network is operated
> exclusively by its operators, and participates for locally-defined
> benefit according to locally-defined needs and desires.

Yes, this is how it works today, but:

> If the Internet is made up entirely of ASes participating freely
> with one another, and if each AS's participation is defined
> according to locally-defined needs and desires, then it follows that
> it is _impossible_ to "protect" the Internet in terms of users'
> associational abilities.

Hold on. Here, I disagree. Let's start with a practical issue: an
operator (an AS) wants to filter 175.45.176.0/24. Today, he can do it
*technically* (it is quite easy) and *legally* (her network, her
rules, and, for this specific case, few people would complain).

*But* if everyone started to do it, and to filter networks they don't
like (or filtering TLDs they don't like in their DNS resolvers, as
suggested in the email I attach, sent to an operations list), then we
would have a problem. A minority of operators filtering
175.45.176.0/24, the Internet would still work and would still be "the
Internet". A majority of operators filtering a lot of networks they
don't like and, at a point, this would no longer be the Internet
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_fragmentation> This is a case
where quantitative changes bring qualitative changes: too much
filtering and we would no longer have a global network.

So, I claim that, despite that fact that each AS has the right to take
decisions such as filtering, if everyone started to exercice this
right fully, this would destroy the Internet.

>     • Claim that there is a social need that trumps the private
>       nature of the participating ASes.

I agree.

>       obligations without individual obligation.

Tricky, OK, but it already exists. See for instance the right to
housing, which is mentioned in several texts
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing>. In a country like
France, most of the homes and buildings are privately owned, yet there
is a collective right to housing
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_au_logement#Le_droit_au_logement_en_France>

>       the positive obligation to carry traffic when nobody else does.

This is a possible solution. But we were talking of rights. Rights
exist even when we don't have yet a solution to do it perfectly. Most
human rights texts don't describe solutions because 1) we may have
several possible solutions, all with pros and cons 2) texts should not
limit imagination, we may invent new solutions.

> It was the telephone network, with rights, obligations, and roles
> carefully delineated by regulations and government-granted monopoly
> rights.  We can observe some of that in, for instance, the "last
> mile" networks in many places.  But I am pretty far from convinced
> that any right to freedom of association would be made more
> operative by reinventing the legal and regulatory regime that made
> possible telco monopolies the world over; or by revivifying the
> bureaucratic, government-and-insiders-only nature of international
> telegraphy treaties.

Well, if the choice is binary, complete freedom of rich private
corporations *or* big bureaucratic governements, indeed, it is no
fun. But I hope mankind may develop alternatives.

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 13:47:02 +0100

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 12:23:44PM +0100,
 Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 70 lines which said:

> (or filtering TLDs they don't like in their DNS resolvers, as
> suggested in the email I attach, sent to an operations list),

Really attached, this time.

Subject: Re: anti-business hippies (Re: the real reason for ICANN's gTLD expansion seems to be...)
From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
To: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
Cc: DNS Operations List <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2018 15:34:31 -0500
List-Id: DNS Operations <dns-operations.lists.dns-oarc.net>

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 3:07 PM, Paul Vixie <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
>
> David C Lawrence wrote:
>
>> Kevin Murphy wrote:
>>
>>> Has the amount of abuse on the internet gone up since the
>>>> introduction of new gTLDs? There must be data on this.
>>>>
>>>
>> John Franklin wrote:
>>
>>> How would you quantify that?  I can see new gTLDs creating new
>>> portals on the internet for bad actors, but I would expect the
>>> number of said bad actors behind them to remain relatively stable.
>>>
>>
>> I suspect that was Kevin's point, trying to suss out whether gTLD
>> expansion is in any way a part of making things worse, or essentially
>> neutral.
>>
>
> i'm not sure why i would care. whether or not gtld-induced badness is part
> of a zero sum game is irrelevant. if there is net new badness, i don't like
> it. if it allowed some badness to move here from elsewhere, i don't like
> that either.

​There is one difference. If the badness has moved rather than this being
new badness, we can avoid the problem entirely by blocking the new gTLDs
entirely.​

I have yet to hear one good reason for supporting resolution of the new
gTLDs.

Is ICANN sharing any of the rent they are extracting with me? No.

Is there any resource that is not malicious of significance on a gTLD? Not
that I am aware.

​Black hole rout 'em till they give the community a good reason to exist.

gTLDs should cost $15/yr and $1​/yr of that go to supporting a
multi-registry back end (without perpetual renewal clauses) to provide
scaling. Domain suffixes would eventually wither away and die the death
they richly deserve.

For a little while, people would have to type 'www.microsoft' to get where
they want to go because the string 'microsoft' would not be assumed to be a
search keyword. But that would go away over time.

Want to get to the mail server? There's an SRV for that. Want the time
service? There's an SRV for that.

Outside large hierarchical institutions like MIT, GE, etc., the only
application protocols that would end up using subdomains is SSH and their
ilk which are the only application protocols that properly connects to a
host as opposed to a service.

​The main obstacle to making it happen is oddly enough BitCoin because the
obvious way to make an open gTLD registry work is with a notary log at the
heart of it. Problem being that when the BitCoin ​bubble bursts it is
almost certain to take anything blockchain down with it. Just like the
South Sea bubble killed the notion of joint stock companies for a century.
_______________________________________________
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[email-masked]
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-operations
dns-operations mailing list
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-operations

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 10:21:47 -0500

> rules, and, for this specific case, few people would complain).

Yes.

> filtering and we would no longer have a global network.

Quite correct.  The logic that maintains the Internet working is, in
that sense, uncomfortably close to the logic of nuclear deterrence.
This is true in two ways.  First, the reason anyone participates in
internetworking is because each gets the positive benefit of the
internetworking, and needs to participate to get that benefit (so
there's a virtuous circle).  Second, all need to rely on everyone
else's similar participation for the effect to work.  But this can
turn into a vicious circle quite easily, and if it does we will indeed
lose the Internet.  That is why power-flexing of the "filter $thing"
is so harmful, and why working out legitimacy is a necessary and
ongoing political process.

> right fully, this would destroy the Internet.

It would, yes.  But that cannot create a positive obligation to
maintain the Internet, or to claim that others' right to association
is so great that I cannot disassociate from them.

> <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_au_logement#Le_droit_au_logement_en_France>

That doesn't sound like a collective right, but an individual right to
housing.  The UDHR certainly makes it an individual right.  The idea
here is that there is a collective right of all to Internet access --
that is, "the association" has a right -- without any particular
individual getting an individual right to it.  So the member of the
collective class gets the right insofar as s/he is a member and
otherwise does not have the right.  In the case of the Internet, I
think it would be either incoherent or else would be making a
distinction without any difference, since the practical effect of
having an individual right or a right as part of the set of one's
associations online would be identical.

> exist even when we don't have yet a solution to do it perfectly.

Some people insist that, yes.  The point is, however, that if there is
a positive right it is at least problematic if there is no practical
way to carry it out.

> fun. But I hope mankind may develop alternatives.

I hope so too.  But I also don't know how it helps us to assert that
there is a "right" here that needs addressing.  I think it is good to
do because it is good for the network: it is in the ethics of the
network, not the rights of the humans, that we see that more
connection is necessarily good.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2018 09:15:35 +0100

Hi Andrew,

> ongoing political process.

I would suggest that assertions around a potential vicious cycle are
good research questions.  Although we have a fair amount of
understanding of positive network effects, I don't know of much
practical examination of negative ones. 
There may be some interesting examples to study, however.  One of those
would be AOL's instance message service, or perhaps Prodigy.  In those
cases there was a better mouse trap, unlike what we are discussing
here.  To be sure, a government could impose sufficient constraints that
electronic communication is altogether prohibited or highly restricted,
as has happened in certain countries.  But then there is all that space
in between no filtering and no communication.  I hazard a guess that
whatever function one might attempt to construct around that space would
not be linear, but really therein lies the research question.

A good case might also be The Great Firewall of China (the elephant in
the room in this discussion).  Is it in fact having an effect?  My
casual observation, and again I could be wrong, is that the Chinese
manage it in such a way as to not substantially harm the network
effect.  Similarly, there are other more barriers that may have stronger
effects, such as language barriers.  Distinguishing between the two is
itself an interesting question.  Even characterizing the natural versus
government-imposed barriers might be an interesting area to delve.

Is this strictly speaking a human rights issue?  Only in as much as the
network itself is said to be a societal benefit, and thereby its
breakdown would be some form of harm.  I leave it to you philosophers to
work that out.

Eliot

---

From: Gisela Perez de Acha <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2018 14:34:18 -0600

Hello everyone, sorry for the delay in my answer but I've been putting
all of your wonderful comments together in order to see the entire
picture of disagreements and concerns.

I would address each point separately, but I think it makes more sense
to do so in the actual document. So, my two general comments are the
following:

1) After reading all of you, I agree that our argument about Internet =
association is rather flawed. It might be mere wording because I think
that ultimately on the substancial issue, Niels and I agree with all of
you. Let us figure it out how to fix this so that all our ideas and
concerns are properly reflected

2) Andrew: the division between positive/negative rights has been left
behind for almost a decade now in human rights law theory and practice.
Traditionally, civil and political rights were deemed as "negative
obligations" for the State (mainly respecting, not interfering) whereas
economical, social and cultural rights were "positive obligations"
(fostering, paying, etc). Now we understand that freedom of expression
should be respected by states, but also fostered in positive ways.
Still, it's useful to think about this in the draft itself.

Thanks to all for the engagement and comments! This has been wonderful.
We will do our best to make a good draft for the next round ;)

Cheers and have a wonderful rest of the week,

Gisela

---

From: Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 09:38:43 +0300

Yes.

> Even though we are indeed working on these revision in response to the comments at last meeting and on the list afterwards, I don't think this should stop document adoption.

The controversy is a good sign. Seems very worthwhile to continue
working out tensions.

>>> - Who is interested in working on it

Me, too.

>> Clean, edit and add all the comments.

I also think my contribution could be mostly editing, making sure the
arguments follow a logical structure and so on.

Clearly there's a need to identify the sticking points and work through
them or present the tensions clearly.

-Mallory

-- 
Mallory Knodel
Head of Digital :: article19.org
gpg fingerprint :: E3EB 63E0 65A3 B240 BCD9  B071 0C32 A271 BD3C C780