[anti-abuse-wg] About "consensus" and "voting"...

What Randy said applies in spades to the original strong community that the Internet used to be.

Today and over the past several years we have -

1. Organisations evolving into or being taken over by corporations who are more concerned with profit (keeping a bad customer despite pressure to the contrary) or cost saving (doing the bare minimum or less to maintain an abuse team) or both

2. Many bad actors themselves becoming part of the ecosystem for example registrars, LIRs, employees in RIRs like the unfortunate afrinic case and similar.

The system that Randy describes  - policy making based on consensus and mutual trust - is unfortunately undermined by various actors for one reason or the other, and this does lead to more and more demands for a change. I agree the change proposed - a vote - might be too radical a solution, but this discussion has been going on for more than eight years by my count.

I sent this to nanog in early 2011 and Richard Cox was heaved out of this wg some months before that

https://ripe.net/ripe/maillists/archives/anti-abuse-wg/2011/msg00000.html

I am not entirely sure the discussion has moved all that much in the past decade beyond this exact point - how to pressure ripe to deal with shady actors getting themselves LIR status or appropriating large legacy netblocks belonging to defunct companies.


--srs
________________________________
From: anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg-bounces at ripe.net> on behalf of Randy Bush <randy at psg.com>
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2020 5:17:57 PM
To: Brian Nisbet <brian.nisbet at heanet.ie>
Cc: anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [anti-abuse-wg] About "consensus" and "voting"...

brian,

excuse my continuing to rant.  if i write a long message, it can not be
good :)  as with spam, you have a delete key.

i think we all dislike spam and other forms of network abuse.  but this
is the only working group whose goal is negative, to stop something.
even the wg's name is composed of two negative words.

when i said:

> for a large segment of the community, and that which was pretty much
> the original population, there is an underlying physics and shared
> experience of moving packets, routing, circuits, bgp, ixen, ... that
> gives us a common experience and understanding.

underlying that culture is the imperative to see that packets get to the
desired destination.  routing, internet exchanges, dns, even ipv6 :)
it's a culture built on cooperation at its very core: bgp, exchanges,
dns replication, ... in order that packets go where they need to go.

so there will be a reflexive dislike of things which propose to stop
packets from getting to where they were intended to go.  proposals to
break routing, rescind address allocations, etc. evoke reactions similar
to proposals for capital punishment.  they seem extreme and go against
ingrained cultural norms.

but many of the citizens of the anti-abuse wg perceive that there is a
war.  as the general community dislikes 'abuse', there is emotional
desire that the anti-abuse warriors will 'win'.  but wars escalate.  and
what was at first defensive often becomes offensive.  and the tools of
the defenders become hard to tell from those of the attackers.  e.g., to
a router geek, rescinding an address allocation may 'feel' similar to a
route hijack and therefore invoke a negative response.  the upside is
that the anti-abuse wg gets significantly higher attendance :)

but this is no longer our mothers' internet.  how does a pacifistic
culture of cooperation deal with anti-cultural behavior?  darned if i
know, my daughter was the political scientist.

back to consensus and voting

given the cultural tensions above, it is likely that there will be
issues where agreement is either very long in coming or not reached at
all.  other than patience, how do we deal with that?  historically, it
has been what dave clark said a few decades back, about when ripe formed

    We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
    We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

when the ietf went through its ever ongoing omphaloskepsis on decision
making, pete resnik produced a rather nice document, rfc 7282.

to move from that to a win/lose voting system will be very hard in a
cooperative consensus based culture.  how do you motivate such a radical
change?  sad to say words such as 'democracy' ring hollow in today's
world.

we the abused should be careful not to grow up to be abusers.

randy

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </ripe/mail/archives/anti-abuse-wg/attachments/20200511/e328431b/attachment.html>