4 ms·

I don't think it is necessary to understand how the internet works technically to "understand the internet". It's like saying a race car driver can't drive fast

I don't think it is necessary to understand how the internet works technically to "understand the internet". It's like saying a race car driver can't drive fast without understanding the physics of a piston.

tristor 4y ago
I get what you're saying, but I think you might be missing the point that I'm making. DNS and BGP aren't JUST technical, they're also deeply geopolitical. The Internet isn't an accident, it's an intentionally and carefully formed set of peer autonomous networks, with a shared protocol and written (and unwritten) rules for how we name and resolve the path to get to those different networks from one another. These standards, the technical implementation of them, and how they interact with the real world is actually deeply geopolitical as well as socioeconomic. It's not just understanding how it works technically, it's understanding how it works from a policy, standardization, and governance perspective. Just like the law, how we arrived at the particular standards and policies informs the context for decisions we make about the technology and how its implemented. Even then, without an understanding of how it works technically, it's not possible to responsibly and accurately adjudicate the law as it relates to these technologies. How BGP and DNS work is actually front and center in many court cases, where the decision rested on a basic misunderstanding, which rendered the outcome either ineffective or unjust. Think of all the cases where DNS blocking is utilized on a court order, not realizing that this is effectively meaningless and is not actually effective. People don't often understand how deep this rabbit hole goes, even technical people who understand the basics of routing. They don't actually understand what a "peering agreement" means, especially what it means when it crosses an international border. The way that the law interacts with the Internet is an integration point that has an especially high level of complexity, and nearly no-one involved in that complexity in our current system day to day is actually qualified to discuss it. When we have failures in this integration point is has deep reaching impacts that have broad implications for how technology continues to develop into the future, and there are both positive and negative consequences for this. As a simple example, the stupidity with courts and DNS blocking and the way in which some governments around the world behave in relation to DNS is actually a core reason why DoH and DoT exist, because misapplication of law based on misunderstanding of technology risked fundamentally breaking the basic building blocks of the Internet required for it to function and for networks to successfully interoperate, so the people who actually understand how it works had to come up with new technology to "route around" stupidity in legislatures and courts around the world. These new technologies /themselves/ have geopolitical consequences (see UK and EU stupidity regarding crypto and its implications for DoH and DoT). It's not JUST understanding the technology, there's the 0th layer and the 8th layer in the reference model.
- kube-system 4y ago
  These things are not the court's job to figure out. It's the job of the parties arguing the cases to explain the technical details of the case and how the law applies. The court is not an expert on any topic other than the law.
  - tristor 4y ago
    These things are literally something which impacts the outcomes of court cases on a nearly daily basis somewhere on the globe, and they interlace into the law in various ways both in the legislative process and in the judicial process. It is possible to create a law which does not map correctly to technical reality if you do not understand, it is possible for the court to order something which does not map correctly to technical reality. Technical reality is not always fungible. At some level, it all becomes physics. Both the legislature and the judiciary in the US, and in other governments around the world, are technically and scientifically illiterate.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Judges don't make decisions about the laws of physics, they make the decisions about the laws of people. If the laws of physics are relevant, an expert can explain the relevant parts during the court proceedings. But the technical details are only of contextual relevance. If the law has ignorant technical consequences, that ain't the judiciary's problem. That has to be fixed by the legislature.
- moronicQ 4y ago
  [dead]
- hnfong 4y ago
  You're basically just saying "I don't like the laws/decisions of XXX because they break my toys and makes my life harder". And it sounds like they're kind of breaking your toys intentionally, instead of, as you claim, "they don't understand it".

tristor 4y ago

I get what you're saying, but I think you might be missing the point that I'm making. DNS and BGP aren't JUST technical, they're also deeply geopolitical. The Internet isn't an accident, it's an intentionally and carefully formed set of peer autonomous networks, with a shared protocol and written (and unwritten) rules for how we name and resolve the path to get to those different networks from one another. These standards, the technical implementation of them, and how they interact with the real world is actually deeply geopolitical as well as socioeconomic. It's not just understanding how it works technically, it's understanding how it works from a policy, standardization, and governance perspective. Just like the law, how we arrived at the particular standards and policies informs the context for decisions we make about the technology and how its implemented. Even then, without an understanding of how it works technically, it's not possible to responsibly and accurately adjudicate the law as it relates to these technologies. How BGP and DNS work is actually front and center in many court cases, where the decision rested on a basic misunderstanding, which rendered the outcome either ineffective or unjust. Think of all the cases where DNS blocking is utilized on a court order, not realizing that this is effectively meaningless and is not actually effective. People don't often understand how deep this rabbit hole goes, even technical people who understand the basics of routing. They don't actually understand what a "peering agreement" means, especially what it means when it crosses an international border. The way that the law interacts with the Internet is an integration point that has an especially high level of complexity, and nearly no-one involved in that complexity in our current system day to day is actually qualified to discuss it. When we have failures in this integration point is has deep reaching impacts that have broad implications for how technology continues to develop into the future, and there are both positive and negative consequences for this. As a simple example, the stupidity with courts and DNS blocking and the way in which some governments around the world behave in relation to DNS is actually a core reason why DoH and DoT exist, because misapplication of law based on misunderstanding of technology risked fundamentally breaking the basic building blocks of the Internet required for it to function and for networks to successfully interoperate, so the people who actually understand how it works had to come up with new technology to "route around" stupidity in legislatures and courts around the world. These new technologies /themselves/ have geopolitical consequences (see UK and EU stupidity regarding crypto and its implications for DoH and DoT). It's not JUST understanding the technology, there's the 0th layer and the 8th layer in the reference model.

kube-system 4y ago
These things are not the court's job to figure out. It's the job of the parties arguing the cases to explain the technical details of the case and how the law applies. The court is not an expert on any topic other than the law.
- tristor 4y ago
  These things are literally something which impacts the outcomes of court cases on a nearly daily basis somewhere on the globe, and they interlace into the law in various ways both in the legislative process and in the judicial process. It is possible to create a law which does not map correctly to technical reality if you do not understand, it is possible for the court to order something which does not map correctly to technical reality. Technical reality is not always fungible. At some level, it all becomes physics. Both the legislature and the judiciary in the US, and in other governments around the world, are technically and scientifically illiterate.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Judges don't make decisions about the laws of physics, they make the decisions about the laws of people. If the laws of physics are relevant, an expert can explain the relevant parts during the court proceedings. But the technical details are only of contextual relevance. If the law has ignorant technical consequences, that ain't the judiciary's problem. That has to be fixed by the legislature.
moronicQ 4y ago
[dead]
hnfong 4y ago
You're basically just saying "I don't like the laws/decisions of XXX because they break my toys and makes my life harder". And it sounds like they're kind of breaking your toys intentionally, instead of, as you claim, "they don't understand it".