It probably behooves us from time to time to consider the fact that the
Internet is now the principal global communication medium. And the IETF has a
degree of control over one of the (many) driving wheels.
When people talk about 'conspiracy theorists' they tend to forget that there
are actual conspiracies.
Looking from the inside out the IETF may look completely innocuous. But it does
not necessarily look the same from the outside in. Some time ago David
Rockerfeller decided to form a dinning club cum policy discussion shop to bring
together important people to talk with each other. They didn't think anything
of the idea but its been the source of many a conspiracy theory. Its called the
Trilateral Commission.
The source of the Trilateral Commission conspiracy theories is not hard to see:
Some people refuse to believe that the world can work the way it does without
someone controlling it.
[And of course they are right, at our monthly meetings of the New World Order
we discuss the really important issues such as whether women's hem lines should
be going up or down and what the new plot lines are going to be for our Britney
Spears/ Rosie O'Donnell soaps.]
Well guess what, there are now people who think the same about the Internet.
They simply cannot believe that such a system can exist without some form of
central control and they want to track that control point down and control it
themselves.
________________________________
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org on behalf of Melinda Shore
Sent: Mon 9/15/2008 3:23 PM
To: Dave Crocker; Michael StJohns
Cc: IETF
Subject: Re: Incumbent conflict of interest
On 9/15/08 3:11 PM, "Dave CROCKER" <dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
This entire line of thinking gets scarier and scarier. If it has any validity
as concern, then we already have a very deep problem. Candidacy often is
already known among some of the IETF community, including among incumbents and
other candidates. So the conflict of interest problem is already present...
if your point is valid.
I think there's a problem, but I don't know how deep. The
thing that strikes about your message is that some people
already know, some people don't. I.e. there's an insider/
outsider division, and that tends (strongly!) to undermine
transparency.
I'm not crazy about announcing nominations because I
really don't like the idea of IETF electoral campaigns (egads),
but I do think there's a general problem of the organization
not having adapted to its current size and to the problems
that size brings. The fact that there's some guy running
around threatening litigation over all kinds of procedural
stuff shouldn't necessarily cause undue worry about lawsuits
but I do think that it should raise the question of what
a security considerations section for a document describing
IETF structure would look like. We're not all Alice and Bob
here anymore.
Melinda
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