The Chinese government has imposed a rule on all conferences held
since 2008 regarding political speech. A fundamental law in China
requires that one not criticize the government. Practically, this
has reference to public political statements or protest marches, which
are not the IETF's custom. The government, which is a party to the issue,
requires that people who attend conferences in China (the IETF being
but one example) not engage in political speech during their tour
in China. We consider this to be acceptable, on the basis that the
IETF intends to abide by the laws of whatever nations it visits and
we don't believe that this impacts our ability to do technical work.
The rule is implemented in the Hotel agreement and reads (note that
the "Client" would be the Host, and the "Group" would be the IETF) :
"Should the contents of the Group's activities, visual or audio
presentations at the conference,or printed materials used at the
conference (which are within the control of the Client) contain
any defamation against the Government of the People's Republic
of China, or show any disrespect to the Chinese culture, or
violates any laws of the People's Republic of China or feature
any topics regarding human rights or religion without prior
approval from the Government of the People's Republic of China,
the Hotel reserves the right to terminate the event on the spot
and/or ask the person(s) who initiates or participates in any or
all of the above action to leave the hotel premises immediately.
The Client will support and assist the Hotel with the necessary
actions to handle such situations. Should there be any financial
loss incurred to the Hotel or damage caused to the Hotel's
reputation as a result of any or all of the above acts, the Hotel
will claim compensation from the Client."
What does this condition mean ? The hotel staff would have, in theory,
the legal right to shut down the meeting and ask the offending
participants to leave the property immediately. While we do not
foresee a situation where such action would take place, we feel that
it is proper to disclose these conditions to the community.
It's not entirely clear to me what these conditions mean, so
maybe it's worth trying to parse them a bit. ISTM that there are
a bunch of potential questions about their interpretation:
1. What materials are covered under this? This could include any
of [in roughly descending order of "officialness"]:
(a) Materials printed in the program [Do we have a program?]
(b) Materials presented by IETF management (IAB, IESG, etc.)
(c) Speech by IETF management
(d) Materials presented by WG participants
(e) Speech by WG participants
2. What exactly is covered by the restriction on "any defamation
against the Government of the People's Republic of China, or show
any disrespect to the Chinese culture, or violates any laws of the
People's Republic of China or feature any topics regarding human
rights or religion"?
3. What recourse, if any, do we have if the hotel staff judge that
the lines above have been crossed?
4. What, if anything, is the IETF on the hook for if the conference
is cancelled?
None of these seem entirely clear from the text above. In the
maximal (and most worrisome) interpretation, the hotel staff, in their
sole discretion, could choose to cancel the entire IETF because a
single WG participant says something about Taiwan in the course of a
WG discussion. If that's in fact the controlling interpretation, then
that seems distinctly problematic.
Is it really that bad? Let's take a deeper look at each term:
1. The materials covered are specified as:
"Should the contents of the Group's activities, visual or audio
presentations at the conference,or printed materials used at the
conference (which are within the control of the Client)"
Except for the final parenthetical, this seems to include all of
(a)-(e). The relevant question then becomes what the meaning
of the final parenthetical is, and in particular, who the
Client is. I suppose one could argue that the Client is just
IASA and so all that's relevant is presentations from IAOC
(or more liberally from the I*). However, if you argue that
the client is IETF then clearly the IETF management *could*
control what people present (E.g., require pre-clearance of
slides) and say (by cutting off the microphones). So, I don't
think this is particularly clear. It doesn't seem to me that
we would really have much of an argument that presentations
at the plenary aren't "within the control of the Client",
however. That said, I think the natural interpretation is
that anything that's on the agenda falls into this category--if
people want to interpret it differently, we should get a
legal opinion to that effect--or better yet, get the
terms modified to make it clear.
2. The offensive topics are described as:
"[1] any defamation
against the Government of the People's Republic of China, or [2] show
any disrespect to the Chinese culture, or [3] violates any laws of the
People's Republic of China or [4] feature any topics regarding human
rights or religion"?
(Numbers mine)
This really seems exceptionally broad. I'm not overly worried about
IETFers defaming the government of the PRC, but I think I can come
up with plausible technical topics that would violate at least
[2] and [4]. In particular:
- An expression that HTTP error codes need not be translated into
Chinese could be argued to show disrespect to Chinese culture.
- Discussion of location privacy [Geopriv] or resistance to lawful
intercept [TLS, RTPSEC, IPsec] could be argued to be
relevant to human rights. I've fairly regularly heard negative
opinions expressed about both the US and Chinese governments
in these discssions.
- As someone else observed, the discussion of net neutrality in last
IETF's plenary could similarly be argued to be relevant to human
rights (cf. Ted's comments) The US and China come in for
criticism here as well.
- Discussion of language differences between Taiwan and China
could easily fall into a number of these categories.
So, absent some narrowing of this clause, it does seem to me like
this would have a chilling effect on technical discussion.
3. This clause actually seems the clearest and the most expansive:
the Hotel reserves the right to terminate the event on the spot
and/or ask the person(s) who initiates or participates in any or
all of the above action to leave the hotel premises immediately.
This appears to me to allow the hotel staff, in their sole discretion,
to determine which actions violate this contract and shut down the
entire IETF meeting. I don't see that we have any meaningful recourse.
Perhaps it's just security guy paranoia, but I would be reluctant to
sign a contract that featured this sort of clause regardless of the
antecedent actions that ostensibly triggered it; the problem here is
that it gives the hotel an incentive to use the implicit threat of
terminating the event as negotiating leverage for other interactions
where they simply wish to get a more advantageous deal.
4. I'm not entirely clear what our liability is here. Consider the
worst case: in the first session on Monday, there's a formal
presentation from an IETF official (e.g., an AD) denouncing China's
Tibet policy. The hotel decides that this is a breach of the above
terms and closes the entire IETF meeting. At this point, a large
fraction of IETFers cancel their hotel reservations, demand their
money back, and go home. Is the IETF required to make the hotel whole?
Maybe these reservations will be un-cancellable, but that's not
been the case for at least some previous meetings I've attended.
If the IETF is on the hook here, this seems like a fairly high
level of risk for the IETF to bear.
The bottom line, then, is that the stated terms seem to me to be quite
problematic: they (at least arguably) seem to apply to relevant
technical discussions by pretty much everyone at IETF and don't give
us any meaningful recourse if the hotel judges that we're in breach.
This leads immediately to the question of whether there is some more
constrained version of these terms that actually would be
acceptable. I don't see much room for negotiation in point (2), which
seems to me to be the meat of the objectionable material. One could
imagine narrowing (1) to apply somehow to only "official" statements
by the IETF and (3) to provide some sort of recourse, or required
escalation procedures, or something. However, I don't know if the IETF
management would be willing to bind themselves to these terms and I
don't know if we could define a meaningful escalation procedure, but
if we were able to achieve these, it seems like the impact on the
rest of the IETF would be marginal. [Speaking solely for myself,
were I still on the IAB I would not be willing to be bound by these
terms.] However, as it is, this seems to me to have the potential
for an unacceptably high impact on the IETF as a whole.
-Ekr
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