Steve,
No, ignoring extreme situations and unless a promise of no Internet
access censorship for the IETF meeting can be obtained, it is a choice
between endorsing censorship or opposing it. Networks censored on a
political, religious, and cultural basis do not "Bring People
Together".
Your message below is fundamentally inconsistent. You claim that the
IETF is so insignificant that if it doesn't meet in China, the IETF
will become irrelevant. Yet you claim that the IETF is so significant
that if it holds a meeting in China and there are troubles, this will
strike a severe blow against China's aspirations. You can't have it
both way.
Donald
On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Steve Crocker <steve(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com>
wrote:
The choice is between engaging and not engaging. Engaging is better. Not
engaging isn't constructive. The Internet and the IETF are all about
engaging, expanding, communicating and being open. Much of this dialog has
been worried about possible extreme situations. Let's focus on the center.
More than a billion people live in China and their use of the Internet is
expanding rapidly. They are building much of the technology and
contributing technically. It's to everyone's advantage to have comfortable,
constructive interaction. Our first slogan was "Networks Bring People
Together."
If you prefer to focus on the negatives, here's my analysis:
If we don't go to China, we have charted a downhill course and the rest of
the world will come together without us. The IETF will lose relevance.
If we do go to China and something bad happens, the consequences will be
much worse for China than for the IETF. The work of the IETF will suffer a
bit, but we'll recover quickly enough. However, China's quest for
engagement with the rest of the world will be hurt more seriously.
Bottom line: We should go to China with a positive attitude. We're robust
enough to deal with any consequences. If we don't go to China, however, we
have weakened ourselves.
Steve
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