Subject: [hrpc] Some Thoughts

From: "Bless, Roland (TM)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2015 18:05:54 +0200

Hi,

I think that the work is important and this proposed research group
needs input from different disciplines:
IETF participants representing the technical side, but also people from
social sciences and legal sciences.

* Larry Masinter made a comment that there is also a need for
  balancing rights. He is correct in the sense that different
  stakeholders may have different objectives, because they focus
  also on different values or assets. This typically leads to
  _conflicts_, maybe even somewhere in the network as nicely
  described in [1]. Usually we use institutions like (social) norms,
  laws and courts in order to resolve such conflicts, but
  also technical systems, either implicitly or explicitly [2].
  Since the Universal declaration of human rights defines some
  of the highest values that we know, it's probably a good starting
  point. Very often different societies have different preferences
  for certain values.

* There was some discussion about protocol definition and
  intended use. I guess that the IETF always has a motivation
  and usage scenario while defining protocols, but the IETF
  usually doesn't do anything if the protocol is used in a
  different manner as originally intended. I think the main
  point here is that IETF participants could try to think about
  alternative protocol designs that may result in different
  implications for human rights etc. It may be beneficial to
  find a methodology how certain rights/values could be
  realized in a better way (e.g., data minimization for
  better privacy etc.).

* Comments on slide 13 of the presentation. Some more
  concepts came to my mind:
  - Accessibility (you need unfettered access to the
Internet/resources/information)
  - Openness (eases participation)
  - Autonomy (e.g., Autonomous System approach)
  - Federations of independent domains (ASes, Mail, XMPP servers etc.)
  Probably the latter two are sub-principles or closely related to the
  distributed nature of solutions.
  One could also view parts of the list from slide 13 hierarchically like:
  Reliability -> Robustness -> Stateless, Graceful failures/degradation,
partial healing, etc.

* On slide 15: the lower terms from "interoperable protocols ...
resilience"
  are concepts that can be used to achieve good/robust
  connectivity. However, if I have no access to that robust
  and well connected network, I'm limited in participation and
  maybe freedom of association. Therefore, accessibility may be
  also important.

Regards,
 Roland

[1] http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2002/papers/tussle.pdf
[2] https://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html