[At-Large] input to WSIS+20 comments sought

[Karl Auerbach]

I agree that there are some really tricky devils in the details.

And I agree that definitions are where a lot of those devils like to live.

I see governance (and many other aspects of life) as having one of two 
basic modes of operation:

1) There is governance that acts through what I call the prime mover 
theory:  A great deal of effort is expended to create a compendious and 
almost fractally detailed policy or law or whatever noun we want to 
use.  This is a method often found in things like building codes where 
the field is fairly mature and this kind of detailed rulemaking can be 
done fairly well.

2) And then there is governance by positive muddling.  This is best for 
when we just kinda know the rough direction we want to go - as Parminder 
puts it, the "constitutional" approach - and then as we go forth we end 
up banging into situations and making adjustments and adding provisos.  
This is kind of how the common law system of case law works.

My sense is that we would be better served by moving forward via 
positive muddling - we set a general direction (such as with the "First 
Law of the Internet") and then start decorating it as we go forth and 
bang into real situations.

One of the things that I like about the muddling-forward approach is 
that it often puts off some hard choices until a tomorrow that may never 
come.

And yes we will reach tension points, like privacy/encryption vs law 
enforcement.  There's probably never going to be a stable balance point 
there, and it may be best to let the policy adopt, and adopt again, and 
then again to the changes in social and political winds.

Here in the US I've kind of lost faith in the notion that we policy or 
law ratchets ever forward and ever better - our supreme court (I no 
longer honor it with capitalization of its name) is in an unprincipled 
process of throwing out nearly a century of law. I would anticipate 
those kind of swings in Internet policy, at least for a long period of time.

         --karl--

On 3/10/23 2:06 AM, christian de larrinaga wrote:
> Sympathetic to this Karl. But ...
>
> Check the UK's Online Safety Bill. For "public detriment" we should now read
> the use of the terms "harms" and "safety". Both are subjectively assessed and at high risk of
> politicisation. They are also being bandied about to be used for
> prevention of harms. This is at the root of argument to make use of
> encryption too risky on communications providers bottom lines.
>
> C
>
>
>
> Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> writes:
>
>> With regard to principles, I like to start with a foundation, vague
>> and ambiguous as it may be, to set a general direction.
>>
>> Below is what I have been proposing for a long time...
>>
>> (By-the-way, this formulation finds its distant ancestor in the US
>> "Hush-a-Phone" case, a rather significant, and somewhat amusing, case
>> that was the start of a sequence that led to the opening of telco
>> circuits to other sues, such as the ARPAnet and Internet.)
>>
>> First Law of the Internet
>>
>> + Every person shall be free to use the Internet in any way
>>    that is privately beneficial without being publicly
>>    detrimental.
>>
>>     - The burden of demonstrating public detriment shall
>>       be on those who wish to prevent the private use.
>>
>>         - Such a demonstration shall require clear and
>>           convincing evidence of public detriment.
>>
>>     - The public detriment must be of such degree and extent
>>       as to justify the suppression of the private activity.
>>
>> https://www.cavebear.com/old_cbblog/000059.html
>>
>> The general shape of this principle is that one has a freedom to use
>> the net as they please.  But that pleasure is subject to the rather
>> cloudy boundary of "public detriment".  However, the principle places
>> the burden of proving that "public detriment" on those who complain.
>> And the level and evidence of that proof has to be high, not merely a
>> bald assertion.
>>
>>          --karl--
>>
>>
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