On 11/29/2011 7:24 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 08:37:09AM -0500, Donald Eastlake wrote:
(c) The IETF does not have any members
The governance of the I* is complicated but I don't think any court
would have any trouble finding that, for some purposes, the membership of
the IETF is those qualified to serve as voting noncom members.
For the purposes to which an anti-competitive practices policy would need to
be put, however, this qualification would be nonsense.
I think Andrew is being too mild. I'll suggest that any discussion on this list
which attempts to predict how a court will interpret something goes beyond
nonsense, especially if there is any view that we should base our actions on
that interpretation.
On Dec 1, 2011, at 1:44 PM, Christian Huitema wrote: I believe that our
current rules are fine. They were specifically designed to prevent the kind
of collusion described in the complaint. Yes, these rules were defined many >
> years ago, but the Sherman Antitrust Act is even older -- it dates from 1890.
> We have an open decision process, explicit rules for intellectual property,
> and a well-defined appeals process.
...
1. We have a very different participation demographic than we had 20 years ago.
Folks who participate have very different models of obligations and they often
make very different decisions about how to act.
2. We now have periodic, real problems with coordinated actions by companies
that are attempting to orchestrate a particular outcome in the IETF. Some of
those actions may well violate some set of anti-trust laws. At the least, we
should make sure the IETF charts those boundaries and establishes an explicit
policy against crossing them.
3. Rather than having one or another non-attorney offering legal opinions about
the sufficiency of our processes, we should get a real attorney to do a basic
evaluation and make whatever recommendations they deem appropriate. The
proposal, here, is not for a large, open-ended effort. It's quite constrained.
Rather than trying to set up rules that cover all hypothetical developments,
I would suggest a practical approach. In our process, disputes are
materialized by an appeal. Specific legal advice on the handling of a
> specific appeal is much more practical than abstract rulemaking.
This appears to be based on the view that an external legal process is amenable
to the IETF's internal procedures. Of course, it isn't.
Once there is a lawsuit, we are locked in to the procedures and authority of the
courts and to the existing facts leading up to the lawsuit. Post-hoc efforts to
evaluate whether we should have done something differently will be at the
court's discretion, not the discretion of an IETF appeals group like the IAB or
ISOC.
However, the concern for excessive policy details to cover hypotheticals, does
quite reasonably argue for simple, basic rules, as indeed others have already noted.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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