[Air-L] Multistakeholder Imposition of Internet Sanctions

[Joly MacFie]

Via Bill Woodcock of PCH on NANOG, a founding statement + technical paper
on '*Multistakeholder Imposition of Internet Sanctions*' signed by a bunch
of people, including former ISOC trustee John Levine.

https://www.pch.net/resources/Papers/Multistakeholder-Imposition-of-Internet-Sanctions.pdf

EXCERPT

 *We believe it is now incumbent upon the Internet community to deliberate
and make decisions in the face of humanitarian crises. We may not
responsibly dismiss such crises without consideration, nor with
consideration only for the self-interest of our community’s own direct
constituents; instead, maturity of governance requires that self interests
be weighed in the balance with broader moral and societal considerations.
This document is the beginning of a global Internet governance conversation
about the appropriate scope of sanctions, the feasibility of sanctions
within the realm of our collective responsibility, and our moral imperative
to minimize detrimental consequences. *

*Principles for Internet Infrastructure Governance Sanctions *

*We, the undersigned, agree to the following principles: *

*● Disconnecting the population of a country from the Internet is a
disproportionate and inappropriate sanction, since it hampers their access
to the very information that might lead them to withdraw support for acts
of war and leaves them with access to only the information their own
government chooses to furnish. *

*● The effectiveness of sanctions should be evaluated relative to
predefined goals. Ineffective sanctions waste effort and willpower and
convey neither unity nor conviction. *

*● Sanctions should be focused and precise. They should minimize the chance
of unintended consequences or collateral damage. Disproportionate or
over-broad sanctions risk fundamentally alienating populations. *

*● Military and propaganda agencies and their information infrastructure
are potential targets of sanctions. *

*● The Internet, due to its transnational nature and consensus-driven
multistakeholder system of governance, currently does not easily lend
itself to the imposition of sanctions in national conflicts. *

*● It is inappropriate and counterproductive for governments to attempt to
compel Internet governance mechanisms to impose sanctions outside of the
community’s multistakeholder decision-making process. *

*● There are nonetheless appropriate, effective, and specific sanctions the
Internet governance community may wish to consider in its deliberative
processes. *


*Recommendations *

*We believe it is the responsibility of the global Internet governance
community to weigh the costs and risks of sanctions against the moral
imperatives that call us to action in defense of society, and we must
address this governance problem now and in the future. We believe the time
is right for the formation of a new, minimal, multistakeholder mechanism,
similar in scale to NSP-Sec or Outages, which after due process and
consensus would publish sanctioned IP addresses and domain names in the
form of public data feeds in standard forms (BGP and RPZ), to be consumed
by any organization that chooses to subscribe to the principles and their
outcome. *

*This process should use clearly documented procedures to assess violations
of international norms in an open, multistakeholder, and consensus-driven
process, taking into account the principles of non-overreach and
effectiveness in making its determinations. This system mirrors existing
systems used by network operators to block spam, malware, and DDoS attacks,
so it requires no new technology and minimal work to implement. *

*We call upon our colleagues to participate in a multistakeholder
deliberation using the mechanism outlined above, to decide whether the IP
addresses and domain names of the Russian military and its propaganda
organs should be sanctioned, and to lay the groundwork for timely decisions
of similar gravity and urgency in the future.   *

Bill writes:





*Now we can focus on operationalization.  Mailing list, web site, etc. are
in the process of being set up.The goal is to have a minimal, lightweight
mechanism with BGP and RPZ feeds that networks can voluntarily subscribe
to.  99% of the time, they’d be empty.  Occasionally, when the Internet
community believes that a military or propaganda agency is problematic
enough to be worth sanctioning, IPs and domains would be added to the feed.
The mechanism is exactly the same as is currently used for blackholing
abuse IPs and domains, so doesn’t take anything new on the subscribing
network’s side, just one more feed.We’re anticipating that debate over what
goes into the list will only happen very occasionally, and the discussion
list will be quiet the rest of the time.  A lot like NSP-Sec and Outages.
And there’ll probably be a lot of overlap with those groups.  All are
welcome, look for an announcement in a few more days.*

-- 
--------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  +12185659365
--------------------------------------
-

-- 
--------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  +12185659365
--------------------------------------
-