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Re: Request for community guidance on issue concerning a future meeting of the IETF

2009-09-23 14:31:31
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On 9/23/09 12:17 PM, Ole Jacobsen wrote:

On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Eric Rescorla wrote:

So, this isn't really that useful context for the rest of the
paragraph. To take the example of encryption, I think people
were arguing that it was a topic "regarding human rights".

With that said, it's not clear to me that saying "China's policy
of censoring the Internet sucks" isn't defamation. 

I would say that this DOES border on defamation, BUT I am at a loss 
to understand why such a statement would be a required part of our 
technical discussion. The statement is an opinion about a topic which 
there is a lot more that can be said, but like the baby said "this 
isn't the venue." (Let's just say that it isn't well understood in
the west). "X policy sucks" sound like politics and not technology
particularly if X is a country.

If on the other hand you were to say: "I am upset about the way 
provider Y in country X does aggregation in BGP because this degrades 
performance of..." you would have little to worry about beyond perhaps 
a technical argument.

Here's the rub. In the heat of the moment during a given technical
discussion, someone might come up to the mic and blurt out "it sucks
that countries like X enforce policy Y and IETF technologies need to
provide a way for end users to route around that kind of interference
with their sacred human right to freedom of unfettered communication".
But now that person probably won't come up to the mic for fear of being
carted away if they don't phrase things very carefully. People who show
up at IETF meetings are simply not in the habit of self-censoring in
this way, which means that they probably won't come up to the mic at all
if they fear that a topic might be forbidden or dangerous. This climate
of fear and self-censorship is a problem.

Peter

- --
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/


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