ietf-822
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Re: Time to act: draft-klyne-msghdr-registry

2002-02-11 18:24:00

Pete Resnick writes:
In ASME v. Hydrolevel, the court held ASME liable for the FRAUDULENT 
acts of one of its officers who acted FOR HIS OWN (or in this case, 
his companies) BENEFIT within the scope of his authority.

It was an antitrust case, not a fraud case. The liability principles
are the same, as the Supreme Court explained in detail, but this doesn't
mean that you have to do something fraudulent to violate antitrust law.
(Price-fixing, for example, doesn't become legal when you do it openly.)

In 1971, the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to ANSI explaining
the effect of antitrust law on standards organizations. There are
substantive rules: for example, ``construction standards'' must never be
used when ``performance standards'' can be developed. There are also
procedural rules: for example, organizations must provide due process,
including ``timely hearings with prompt decisions.''

In 1998, the FTC chairman publicly emphasized the importance of ``clear,
fair procedures'' to help standards organizations avoid mistakes, to
force ``the presentation of valid reasons for any potentially
anticompetitive activity,'' and to ``provide an antitrust tribunal with
a record.'' In other words, the decisions not only have to be justified,
but also have to be documented so that judges can _see_ that they were
justified.

ISOC/IAB/IESG/IETF/IANA/whatever is blatantly violating these rules when
it gives authority to someone like Keith to declare that, for example,
Mail-Followup-To shouldn't be implemented. In a legitimate standards
organization such as ANSI, _nobody_ has that much power.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago