Subject: [hrpc] Small remarks about draft-tenoever-hrpc-association-01

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 16:35:02 +0200

> it also makes it legally and technically very difficult to
> communicate a message to someone who did not explicitly ask for
> this.  In public offline spaces we regularly get exposed to flyers,
> invitations or demonstrations where our opinions get challenged, or
> we are invited to consider different viewpoints.  There is no
> equivalent on the Internet with the technical and legal regime that
> currently operates in it.

This will make many people fall from their chair when reading
this. The later paragraph "This could be interpretated as an argument
for the injection of unrequested messages" explains it a bit but,
still, I think it is quite provocative to say this without immediately
saying that there is a big scalability issue. If it were
legal/acceptable/normal to expose people to unwanted messages online,
we would be drowned in such messages, and no expression would be
possible anymore. Actually, allowing illimited sending of unsolicited
messages would be a blow against freedom of speech: when everyone
talks, nobody listens.

> This reinforces a concept that is regularly discussed on the
> application level, called 'filter bubble':

I never really bought this argument. First, people who use it often
imply that it is a new thing. It is not: people have been talking
mostly to like-minded people for ages. Before the Internet, people
read only the newspaper with the ideas they share, etc.

Second, I think is is good to "get exposed to flyers, invitations or
demonstrations where our opinions get challenged, or we are invited to
consider different viewpoints" but it must not be imposed from
outside. You cannot force people to read other's viewpoints.

> because it is not trivial for an edge-user to operate its own
> Autonomous System

That's a technical detail. Even if it were ultra-simple, you would
still need to be "accepted" by peers, by people who agree to connect
you (whether they base their decision on money, politics or good
heart). The Internet is a social network: you have to be "introduced"
by other people (the real problem is that the set of introducers is
too limited and too homogeneous).

---

From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2017 18:43:36 +0200

Hi Stephane,

I hope the new drafts addresses your comments!

Cheers,

Niels

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 04:35:02PM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> hrpc mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc

-- 

Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital

Article 19
www.article19.org

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