Dear Members,

I appealed the IESG and now the IAB concerning RFC 6852. You will find all the documentation on this appeal and the related debate at http://architf.org. The site is under preparation, the mailing list is open.


Why this appeal?

My main point is that RFC 3935 had stated that the mission of IAB, IETF, and IRTF were to influence those who design, use, and manage the Internet in a way so that it works better. This was an absolute target and, therefore, an architectonic target (belonging to the construction of the world, in this case of the digisphere). RFC 6852 changes that. The IABn IETF, IEEE, W3C and ISOC standardization paradigm is market economy related.

This is not bad news. It could could foster some more innovations. However, it is a relative target.
No replacement is provided at the top layer of our concerns : we do we digitally want?. This is just not considered as long as all of us keep happily purchasing.


Risk of radical monopoly

This means that we run into the risk of organizing a radical monopoly if it is not encapsulated within an adequate multiconsensual framework where the top layers’ concerns are addressed in a current, appropriate way (actually before RFC 6852 only a few had identified the risk resulting from the fact thath the first human made "universal" [like cosmos, life, etc.] had no plan. No one in the cockpit: implicitly everyone thought that the IAB wise men were in control. Actually, they are not).

According to Wikipedia, a radical monopoly (Ivan Illich) results from the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. One speaks about a radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition.

At this stage, RFC 6852 calls on the inclusion of every SDO (technical standardization organizations). If we were to forget the regalian domain, civil society, and international organizations‘ and others stakeholders' normative rights, the monopoly over the digital global commons and global ecosystem stewardship would progressively drift toward the members of the "OpenStand" agreement (the text of RFC 6852). (http://open-stand.org). Exclusively, the industry and the engineers.


My Civil Society open proposition

My Civil Society based proposition is for an "NDO" (norms documentation organization) open debate on the way to address the main question:  “what is the digital world that we want and how do we manage to control what we will get?”.

Why do I speak of norms and not of standards or agreements? This is the confusion from which we suffer. Norms describe what we have or want. Standards describe how we want to obtain it. Agreement are over the way we use what we got. The digisphere is made of several architectures in different areas in order to address a large diversity of needs. The debate that I am calling for is to discuss the normative esthetic that we want for it.

-  The WSIS stated that it had to be people centered.
-  RFC 6852 states that it has to consider market economics.
-  My personal goal is for everything to work better for everyone.


My goal is not a dream

This is not a dream; it is a different layer that humanity has never had to consider before. Up to now, from ancient Greece, politicians were to manage the City and insure and protect its internal and external peace through judiciary and military powers. Now, we have to be careful about the way we build the City’s environment, so that we do not build a City where people would face conflicts due to our past bugs. Like, for example, with global warming. We have to consider the digital and e-societal pollution that we may create.

This kind of care results from the precautionary principle. It states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, to the environment , or to the future, in the absence of scientific and political consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an act. In Europe, this is a constitutional duty (Lisbon Treaty) together with the duty to undertake preventive action, in which rectification at the source is a priority and that the origin of the harm should pay. It was crafted for the natural environment, but in France at least, as a part of the constitutional block, its spirit applies to every law and obviously applies also to the artificial cyberspace environment.


A foreseen human step ahead

Because this is new, and we have never had architectonical duties aside from the human, political, judiciary, and military duties, we have to invent a process together. It is to involve Governments, International organizations, private sector, and Civil Society members. Moreover, we have to be aware that if the needs come from technology, as an active aisle of human development, it concerns everything and everyone: constitutions, economy, money, cultures, sovereignty, etc.

We have known and tried to delay its implications, from the very beginning, from Dr. Lessig’s famous "Code is law": "In a critical sense, we Americans are not democrats anymore. Cyberspace has shown us this, our passivity in the face of its change confirms this. Both should push us to figure out why."

That we are not democrats anymore is true for all of us, and not only due to our passivity. Networking permits a complex society, i.e. a society where dialogue (two people) and dialectic (two ideas for a synthesis) are replaced by multilogue (many people with many people, extending the familial “polylogue”) and polylectic (many ideas, messages, and information collapsing together). We have entered into polycracy.


This step ahead is necessary

And, remember, the top layer of our global polycratic process has no dedicated structure or doctrine.

All this is because architectures lead us. Richard Fuller said “In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete”: this is why RFC 6852 is adequate in documenting a new paradigm for the making of an architecture. This is also why it now has to be completed and given a framework for telling the way our new architectures' esthetics are to be decided. This way we will be able to agree on the ethics to respect in order to technically best implement the consensually desired esthetics. In this process, the role of the multiple stakeholders (people, users, politicians, lawyers, strategists) is not to replace the engineers in designing their machines but rather to inform them of their consensual requirements and guidance.

You will find all the documentation on this appeal and the related debate at http://architf.org.

jfc