Subject: Re: Beyond reproach, accountability and regulation

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:27:22 -0700

Here is a dictionary definition of "Beyond reproach":

Beyond reproach:  So good as to preclude any possibility of criticism. 

Last time I looked, RFC 3777 did not include this definition as a requirement for the nomcom in selection of I* candidates. 

Good thing, too.  We seem to have "gotten by" with candidates with occasional imperfections over the years. 

Given the impossibility of populating all leadership positions with individuals "beyond reproach", or even defining all potentially problematic behaviors, what is the way forward?  How do we move "beyond reproach"? 

Years ago, the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation (of all people)  published an article called 'Moving Beyond Reproach' that talks about moving beyond accountability initiatives:
http://www.the-dma.org/nonprofitfederation/March2005final.pdf

Some quotes:

"though nonprofits could seemingly drown in the flood of accountability initiatives, there is virtually no support for nonprofit leaders in dealing with actual ethical crises..."

"it is clear that the nonprofit sector can do more good by focusing on ways to provide real support for dealing with actual crises than by trying to abolish them by decree."

Some food for thought. 

==================================

On Wednesday, April 22, 2009 Clint Chaplin said:

"...Popper said that it is reasonable to assume that sooner or later
some rotten scoundrels will gain power.  It's not important who they
will be precisely, but whatever your political views might be you must
agree that a likelihood of such an event is rather high.  So whatever
law you want to have in your country, don't ask yourself the question
"how this law can be used in good hands".  Ask the question "how this
law can be used when the filthiest, dirtiest, stupidest bastards will
rule my country (and sooner or later they probably will)".  

Only the
law that cannot be used to do anything wrong EVEN by the most vicious
ruler is truly good...."

On 4/22/09, Phillip Hallam-baker also wrote: 

One of the commentators in a recent thread suggested that another person was "beyond reproach". That has been worrying me as a security person for a number of reasons.  Not least the fact that in my business nobody is ever beyond reproach. 

For the past eight years the establishment press in this country told us daily that suggesting that the 'president' was not beyond reproach was  tantamount to committing treason,

It seems to me that many of the social infrastructures that have developed
>over the years by IETF members suffer from being dependent on being run by individuals who are and must be beyond reproach. 

That is a very fragile model. 

If someone is beyond reproach they are beyond accountability.

---

From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:03:32 -0700

Bernard Aboba wrote:
> Last time I looked, RFC 3777 did not include this definition as a
> requirement for the nomcom in selection of I* candidates.
> 

One might also simply conclude that that the statement that an
individual was beyond reproach was baseless or rooted in hyperbole
rather than on some epistemological fallacy that asserts that there
exist individuals who are beyond reproach.

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:22:08 -0700

>The problem here is that a
> consensus based approach is a lousy way to deal with large complicated
> problems where the number of stakeholders is very large and only a
> tiny minority of them are able to participate in the IETF process in
> an effective manner.
 
This may well be true, but in many respects it reminds me of the Winston Churchill quotation:

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

> ICANN might not be the right place to discuss issues such as I18N, but IETF is worse. 

ICANN is not by its nature a standards body so that it's not naturally well suited to discussion of standards issues, nor would it appear that it has any aspirations in that regard. Given that, I'm not sure what if any role ICANN could play in enhancing progress in DNS-related standards, other than perhaps providing some operational feedback.  

> And worst of all would
> be to have a situation where IETF is defacto ratifying decisions that
> are actually being deliberated in ICANN process.

So far, I  haven't seen much evidence of that.

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:35:41 -0400

--On Thursday, April 30, 2009 00:22 -0700 Bernard Aboba
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> ICANN is not by its nature a standards body so that it's not
> naturally well suited to discussion of standards issues, nor
> would it appear that it has any aspirations in that regard.
> Given that, I'm not sure what if any role ICANN could play in
> enhancing progress in DNS-related standards, other than
> perhaps providing some operational feedback.  

I would add that, for better or worse, IETF is somewhat harder
to capture and somewhat less prone to influence by narrowly
focused commercial and/or political interests in this area than
ICANN.  The vast majority of ICANN participants have tended to
focus on "names" and "name markets", rather than on identifiers
and have often been somewhat unwilling to engage on actual DNS
operational and technical issues and constraints.  (Whether
"somewhat" in those sentences should be replaced by a word like
"immensely" is not, IMO, a useful debate here.)

Remember that, if one were strictly a marketer of names and
indifferent to the usability of the Internet, confusion is one's
friend -- it is a tool for selling more names and, more
generally, has already been a key ingredient in the generation
of FUD.

>> And worst of all would
>> be to have a situation where IETF is defacto ratifying
>> decisions that are actually being deliberated in ICANN
>> process.
> 

I'm reasonably close to what is going on and, while I've seen
evidence of pressure on IETF due to the timing of ICANN
processes --far more of that in 2002-2003 than now-- I've seen
no evidence at all of such de facto ratification or even of
serious attempts to make it happen.

    john

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:03:00 -0400

No, I think that it was an attempt to claim that no criticism should
ever be directed at that individual.

As is the case with the British monarch, those who leap to the defense
of the honor of the Queen are more often as not attempting to put
criticism of their own position beyond the bounds of acceptable
debate.

In theory we have a consensus based organization. In practice we have
a system where it is rather easy for some people to take strategic
offense as a tactic to shut down debate.

Are the I18N issues that were raised in the earlier thread being
treated appropriately? Maybe, maybe not. The problem here is that a
consensus based approach is a lousy way to deal with large complicated
problems where the number of stakeholders is very large and only a
tiny minority of them are able to participate in the IETF process in
an effective manner.

We do have a structural problem dealling with inconvenient news. Take
DNSSEC for example which has been in development for fifteen years and
is still not even close to deployment. Instead of looking at the delay
and aggressively seeking out the barriers to deployment, the IETF
approach has been to shoot each messenger who dares suggest that there
might be a deployment obstacle. Instead of looking at real world
requirements caused by things like European Union laws and changing
the specification to suit, the group wasted three years arguing over
whether there was a problem. This is on top of the three years wasted
as a result of refusing to accept that deployment would not happen as
long as it was a requirement to sign every NXT record in .com.

I recently pointed out that we are going to have a really big problem
when SHA1 is no longer considered trustworthy. Instead of actually
addessing the issue we had a stupid flame war. And of course we have
done nothing to fix the fact that moving from SHA1 to SHAn is going to
be orders of magnitude harder than the move from MD5 to SHA1 for the
simple reason that every browser supported SHA1 while almost none
support SHAn today.

It seems to me that part of the problem here is that ICANN should not
have farmed out responsibility for DNS standards to IETF and then sat
back as if it absolved them of all responsibility in the matter.

The DNS infrastructure is no longer a technical infrastructure, it is
largely a social construct. ICANN might not be the right place to
discuss issues such as I18N, but IETF is worse. And worst of all would
be to have a situation where IETF is defacto ratifying decisions that
are actually being deliberated in IACNN process.

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:03 AM, Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
>

-- 
-- 
New Website: http://hallambaker.com/
View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week,
http://quantumofstupid.com/

---

From: "David W. Hankins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:26:02 -0700

> offense as a tactic to shut down debate.

'Establishing (rough) consensus' is, at its root, Sophistic debate.

To be complete:  The IETF system relies upon those presenting drafts
to be judged as having consensus to progress, or not.  It is not
required (by either the draft authors or the audience) to provide
proof outside of convincing the judges - those who measure and form
consensus - about whether or not to progress a draft (this does not
mean that people do not supply proof, it merely is not required; one
only needs to be convincing, and certainly proof can be very
convincing).  Of course Sophists was more in the realm of determining
the truth or falsehood of a given statement, but the boolean nature of
true and false tracks well with the IETF's boolean nature of 'progress
or not,' and this system of consensus suffuses both draft progression
and the debate of draft contents.

It should therefore not be surprising that all manner of classical
Sophist rhetoric is used by the IETF's volunteers to their own ends,
successfully.

Although today we may have a negative stereotype of Sophism, I think
collectively we believe there can be no other way (than Sophistic
debate) for the IETF to pursue its agenda on the basis that we often
argue issues that simply cannot be fully explained or brought into
evidence, and even more frequently enter into the realm of politics
(and what place would logic have there?).

I was very dissatisfied with the IETF's performance towards its agenda
until this occurred to me.  It would have helped me immensely if it
were formally identified in this way (but then that would require the
IETF carry a 'Philosophy Area'), and to some extent I imagine that
this is also the problem some of the IETF's more vocal detractors are
wrestling with; the belief that the IETF does or should follow a
Socratic, Aristotelian, or even Democratic methodology, and the
resulting confusion and hurt feelings to discover that blatantly
Sophist rhetoric has succeeded where their deductions or even
elections have failed.

And yes, claiming that some person or ideaology is beyond reproach
("the end to end principle", the collective phrasology of John Postel)
is a valid, if unfortunate, Sophist technique to convince.

-- 
David W. Hankins	"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer		     you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.		-- Jack T. Hankins

---

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:42:11 -0400

> Sophist rhetoric has succeeded where their deductions or even

That's a rather interesting, and dare I say it, insightful way of
looking at it.  Maybe (and I'm only half saying this in jest) "Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" should mentioned as recommended
reading to the "Tao of the IETF" --- and that what we are after, is
"Quality" in our standards.  

Quoting from a description of that book:

   Much of the book focuses on a rather surprising topic: quality. We
   think of quality as a measure of a product or a person, and we feel
   the right to make judgments about it because it is clear when
   something is of quality or is not. The narrator recounts taking his
   motorcycle to a workshop and reluctantly handing it over to a crew
   of young men playing loud music. Instead of fixing the machine,
   they butcher it, and he learns a lesson: it is the attitude towards
   a technological problem, not simply rational knowledge of how a
   thing works, that makes all the difference. Merely going by the
   manual is a clumsy, low-quality approach. Thereafter, he did the
   work himself.

   Quality cannot be defined in a rational way, it can only noticed
   when it happens. Yet quality is everything: the difference between
   someone who cares, and one who does not; between a machine that can
   enrich your life, and one that explodes into a heap of useless
   mental. Yet instruction manuals, the narrator observes, totally
   leave out of the picture the person who is putting something
   together. If you are angry or unmotivated, you will not succeed in
   tuning the machine or finding the problem, but if you patiently put
   your mind into the place of the original designer, you come to see
   that a machine is really just the physical expression of a set of
   ideas. Paradoxically, it is only when you go beyond the classical
   idea that we can separate our mind from the world, that 'objects'
   begin to come alive. Quality is appreciated not as a thing, but as
   the force that drives the universe. The narrator notes, "Obviously
   some things are better than others.but what's the 'betterness'?"
   His epiphany comes in reading the ancient Tao Te Ching, when he
   realizes that what we call Quality, or 'betterness', is the same as
   the Eastern concept of 'Tao', the universal power or essence which
   can never be identified as such, but whose presence or absence
   makes something good.[1]

[1] http://butler-bowdon.com/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance.html

Another way of putting this is the oft-made observation that
"Engineering" is the IETF's middle name, and that very often,
especially when the problem is heavily constrained, the engineering
tradeoffs that we often have to make are very much a matter good taste
and judgement, and not necessarily something that can decided using
traditional Socratic or Aristotelian modes of argumentation.

						- Ted