Dean Willis allegedly wrote on 09/26/2009 1:04 PM: > Because China's policy on censoring the Internet sucks, and we have a > moral and ethical responsibility to make the Internet available despite > that policy.
rfc3935 says The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant technical and engineering documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the Internet work better. These documents include protocol standards, best current practices, and informational documents of various kinds. Individually we may feel a desire to work on changing government policies on Internet availability, but that is not an IETF activity. The IETF may decide not to pursue technology simply based on the aggregate of individual participants deciding not to, but the IETF does not itself take positions on the ethics of various governments, just on whether technologies support the mission statement above. I and the United Nations support the goal of open access to the Internet (although I think you are oversimplifying the situation with both China and the rest of the world), but scope and venue are important, otherwise it becomes difficult to make progress. > The question: does meeting in China do more to further the goal of > getting past PRC (and others) deplorable policies Personally I don't think it would have any effect. They have far bigger fish to fry. Meeting in China furthers the IETF's goals by better integrating the work China is doing on technology and standards with what the IETF is doing -- while if you/we don't go, China continues as it has been. There are no solid, black-and-white, deterministic answers here. We're dealing with people and cultures. All we can do is predict likelihood. Personally, I believe that unless someone organizes a demonstration (and I do know someone who went to a meeting, demonstrated on Tiananmen square, and was told not to come back), there is very little chance of repercussions for talking the way we do in meetings. As long as a WG agenda is not purely political -- as long as the main issue is what technology to use and its implications for IETF goals -- I don't think there will be any trouble. If you want to look for trouble you can easily find it, but imho the likelihood of trouble looking for you is very small. Scott _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
