Subject: Re: [hrpc] draft-tenoever-hrpc-association-00

From: Gisela Perez de Acha <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2017 10:47:27 -0500

Asunto: Re: [hrpc] draft-tenoever-hrpc-association-00
De: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Fecha: 3/29/17, 11:09 AM
Para: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
CC: [email-masked]

Dear Stéphane, sorry for my late reply. I've been away these past weeks.
Thanks a lot for your comments! They are super good.

I believe what lies at the heart of the issue is 1) the definition of
"protest"; 2) the definition of "public spaces". Specially because
regarding point 1) I believe (from what I read) that you are only
thinking about one specific kind of protest: the
massive-street-demonstration. I'd like to challenge this definition,
because I any type of public dissent is an act of protest.

Let me divide my answer to have more clarity.

* the draft says "This document aims to document forms of protest" but
contains little about protests. It is a very difficult issue and I
don't have an immediate answer but it is certainly something to
address. What is the Internet equivalent of a protest in the streets?
We all (I think) agress that dDoS are NOT this equivalent, and are
something to fight. But then what?  "Blackening" Web sites is a "pull
protest", where you give a message to people who came to search
one. What is possible for a "push protest"?  [Note that it is related
to the problem of the lack of a public space - think streets and
market places - on the Internet.]

## First, "the right to protest" is actually a bunch of rights that
include freedom of expression and more specifically, right to assembly.
The only difference is that the content is usually about dissent (and
it's not always collective or massive: a) it can be done individually,
like high profile naked protests or evironmental protests like what
Greenpeace does). I guess that's why we preferred to address the issue
from the "assembly" perspective which is broader, thinking about cases
where it was used to express dissent. But you are right that this
approach still leaves the question about "online protests" at the
infrastructure level pretty unresolved. It strikes me that it is so hard
to think about an example that does not damage architecture itself.

## Secondly, your comment about public/private raises another important
point: protesting really makes sense when it's public. Offline, a
private protest is anthitetic by nature: does a political message make
sense if nobody hears about it? Let's say you are locked in a room or a
house and yell your message to two people. Is that a protest? An online
analogy could also be made: would it be a protest if you send -your
dissenting message or picture- over email to one person? How about to
two, or more, over encrypted email? Don't we need power (or society) to
get the message in order to define the political act? (this questions
are complicated too, because then you qualify a protest given the
visibility of it, which is not ideal) So, we basically need to think
about a) a collective of people; b) that come together; c) to dissent;
d) publicly.

## Then, when you refer to the lack of "public spaces" on the internet,
I believe that is also tricky. There's many definitions of "public": 1)
the one that derives from governmental power [a.k.a. monopoly of the
legitimate use of violence]; 2) goods and services that are non-rival
and non-exclusive; 3) a "sphere" or space where citizenship can discuss
things outside of governmental reach (a public sphere itself). This is
important, because you CAN protest at a mall without being kicked out.
Even though it's a "private space" it becomes a "public sphere" because
of potential broad interactions. How can we talk about this at the
infrastructure level? I think if we can solve this first question, we
might be able to think about the rest and properly document more protest
examples.

* "it also makes it legally and technically very difficult to
communite a message to someone who did not explicitly ask for this"
There is here a difference between the Internet and the meat space. In
the meat space, it is acceptable to "push" messages to people "who did
not explicitly ask for this" because it doesn't scale: Jehovah's
witnesses can bang on your door, to talk about Jesus and it is most of
the time regarded as acceptable (even if annoying) precisely because
it doesn't scale. One Jehovah's witness cannot bang on one million
doors at the same time. So, there is little risk that this freedom to
push messages will be abused. On the Internet, it is the opposite. The
example given in the draft ("a message was distributed to the server
logs of millons of servers through the 'masscan'-tool") is spam, pure
and simple. One person can do it, with very limited resources. If it
were regarded as acceptable, logs would become unusable.

## I believe this is very connected to your first question: is there a
way to make a "push protest" at the architecture level? Or did the spam
-legal and technical regulation- made it so that we have to
"pre-approve" messages before receving them? Also your example about
"pull protests" is very good, I think we should add it. The point about
scale is very interesting too, but now it's got me thinking on whether
if somebody could use spam-like mechanisms to spread a dissenting
message over the internet.

* I think this is a very important issue, when discussing Internet
vs. meatspace. In the meatspace, when you protest, when you push
messages, you commit resources: your time and sometimes, depending
on the country, your physical security. It has two consequences:
protests have meaning (one million people in the street mean
something, politically, while one million bots mean nothing), and the
risk of abuse is limited (you cannot have a one-million-people
demonstration blocking the city center twice a day).

## Very interesting. But, aren't you thinking only about one kind on
protest? The one that is excercised collectively on the streets? Plus,
isn't the point of the internet to make communication and expressions
more readily available to a broader public with "less resources"? Why
would you have to commit so much on a protest?

Don't get me wrong, I'm just trying to take in broader definitions of
protests to see if we can eventually reach internet architecture with a
good example.

* "a concept that is regularly discussed on the application level,
called 'filter bubble'" I think this concept is seriously exaggerated,
often in anti-Internet propaganda. Before the Internet, people were
already reading only books and newspapers they agree with, only
talking with similar-minded friends, etc. It has nothing new.

##Sure, agreed, but your first comment is also connected to this: it
seems we can only think about "pull protests" but not "push protests".
How would you call this if not a sort of "filter bubble"?

* a pre-draft circulated with interesting examples of peer-production
systems, decision-making platforms. These examples are not in -00.  Is
it because it was applications, not infrastructure?

Cheers!!

--
Gisela Pérez de Acha
Public Policy - Derechos Digitales

> _______________________________________________
> hrpc mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc
>