[anti-abuse-wg] Working Group Charter

Sascha,
Sascha Luck wrote the following on 29/05/2014 21:31:
> On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 07:11:44AM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> On 5/27/2014 6:47 AM, Brian Nisbet wrote:
>>> "While areas such as cybersquatting or hosting illegal content are not
>>> seen as a central part of the working group's remit, they are
>>> unquestionably bound up in other aspects of network abuse and, as such,
>>> may well be areas of interest."
>>
>>
>> Hmmm... oddly, that could turn out to be the more useful wording.
>>
>> It is descriptive and does not really try to be prescriptive (or
>> proscriptive), though of course it walks right up to that point.
>>
>> As such, it paints a a bit of territory that might be 'related', but
>> does neither requires nor prohibits traveling in the territory.  I would
>> therefore expect wg management to determine salience according to other
>> criteria in the charter...
>
> I am not very comfortable with prescribing limits to what people can
> discuss, but I'm even less comfortable with any policy that may result
> from an over-broad mandate. From my POV, the ideal charter would be one
> that states "the wg can
> discuss and make recommendations on, anything it feels like; but has no
> mandate to make policy resulting from those discussions or
> recommendations.

Why would you want to remove the ability to make policy from a WG? It's 
a fundamental piece of work that they do, even if it's never used.

> In short, I'm trying to prevent a small cabal of "anti-abuse" people
> from instrumentalising RIPE or the NCC as some sort of enforcer of
> allowable content or copyrights, etc.

Just because something is in the charter doesn't mean people will make 
policy about it. Equally, just because it isn't in the charter, that 
doesn't stop someone in the community coming up with some policy. I 
will, of course, agree it makes conversation easier. I could even remove 
the word 'well' from the paragraph above to soften it.

Policy is never made in isolation. We shout it loud and wide when a 
policy is submitted and people react to things they don't like. Some 
things do change over time (I was amazed when we eventually reached 
consensus on abuse-c), but it should not follow from that that all 
things will.

All of that said, so far we've had a couple of pieces of text proposed. 
There have been (a small number of) voices on either side of the 
discussion around copyright etc. Are there any other opinions on this?

Brian