[NNagain] Introduction: Dr. David Bray

Thu Oct 5 16:43:57 EDT 2023

Thanks for all your efforts to keep the "feedback loop" to the 
rulemakers functioning!

I'd like to offer a suggestion for a hopefully politically acceptable 
way to handle the deluge, derived from my own battles with "email" over 
the years (decades).

Back in the 1970s, I implemented one of the first email systems on the 
Arpanet, under the mentorship of JCR Licklider, who had been pursuing 
his vision of a "Galactic Network" at ARPA and MIT.   One of the things 
we discovered was the significance of anonymity.   At the time, 
anonymity was forbidden on the Arpanet; you needed an account on some 
computer, protected by passwords, in order to legitimately use the 
network.   The mechanisms were crude and easily broken, but the 
principle applied.

Over the years, that principle has been forgotten, and the right to be 
anonymous has become entrenched.   But many uses of the network, and 
needs of its users, demand accountability, so all sorts of mechanisms 
have been pasted on top of the network to provide ways to judge user 
identity.  Banks, medical services, governments, and businesses all 
demand some way of proving your identity, with passwords, various 
schemes of 2FA, VPNs, or other such technology, with varying degrees of 
protection.   It is still possible to be anonymous on the net, but many 
things you do require you to prove, to some extent, who you are.

So, my suggestion for handling the deluge of "comments" is:

1/ create some mechanism for "registering" your intent to submit a 
comment.   Make it hard for bots to register.  Perhaps you can leverage 
the work of various partners, e.g., ISPs, retailers, government 
agencies, financial institutions, of others who already have some way of 
identifying their users.

2/ Also make registration optional - anyone can still submit comments 
anonymously if they choose.

3/ for "registered commenters", provide a way to "edit" your previous 
comment - i.e., advise that your comment is always the last one you 
submitted.   I.E., whoever you are, you can only submit one comment, 
which will be the last one you submit.

4/ In the thousands of pages of comments, somehow flag the ones that are 
from registered commenters, visible to the people who read the 
comments.   Even better, provide those "information consumers" with ways 
to sort, filter, and search through the body of comments.

This may not reduce the deluge of comments, but I'd expect it to help 
the lawyers and politicians keep their heads above the water.

Anonymity is an important issue for Net Neutrality too, but I'll opine 
about that separately.....

Jack Haverty

On 10/2/23 12:38, David Bray, PhD via Nnagain wrote:
> Greetings all and thank you Dave Taht for that very kind intro...
>
> First, I'll open with I'm a gosh-darn non-partisan, which means I 
> swore an oath to uphold the Constitution first and serve the United 
> States - not a specific party, tribe, or ideology. This often means, 
> especially in today's era of 24/7 news and social media, non-partisans 
> have to "top cover".
>
> Second, I'll share that in what happened in 2017 (which itself was 10x 
> what we saw in 2014) my biggest concern was and remains that a few 
> actors attempted to flood the system with less-than-authentic comments.
>
> In some respects this is not new. The whole "notice and comment" 
> process is a legacy process that goes back decades. And the FCC (and 
> others) have had postcard floods of comments, mimeographed letters of 
> comments, faxed floods of comments, and now this - which, when 
> combined with generative AI, will be yet another flood.
>
> Which gets me to my biggest concern as a non-partisan in 2023-2024, 
> namely how LLMs might misuse and abuse the commenting process further.
>
> Both in 2014 and 2017, I asked FCC General Counsel if I could use 
> CAPTChA to try to reduce the volume of web scrapers or bots both 
> filing and pulling info from the Electronic Comment Filing System.
>
> Both times I was told *no* out of concerns that they might prevent 
> someone from filing. I asked if I could block obvious spam, defined as 
> someone filing a comment >100 times a minute, and was similarly told 
> no because one of those possible comments might be genuine and/or it 
> could be an ex party filing en masse for others.
>
> For 2017 we had to spin up 30x the number of AWS cloud instances to 
> handle the load - and this was a flood of comments at 4am, 5am, and 
> 6am ET at night which normally shouldn’t see such volumes. When I said 
> there was a combination of actual humans wanting to leave comments and 
> others who were effectively denying service to others (especially 
> because if anyone wanted to do a batch upload of 100,000 comments or 
> more they could submit a CSV file or a comment with 100,000 
> signatories) - both parties said no, that couldn’t be happening.
>
> Until 2021 when the NY Attorney General proved that was exactly what 
> was happening with 18m of the 23m apparently from non-authentic origin 
> with ~9m from one side of the political aisle (and six companies) and 
> ~9m from the other side of the political aisle (and one or more 
> teenagers).
>
> So with Net Neutrality back on the agenda - here’s a simple 
> prediction, even if the volume of comments is somehow controlled, 
> 10,000+ pages of comments produced by ChatGPT or a different LLM is 
> both possible and probably will be done. The question is if someone 
> includes a legitimate legal argument on page 6,517 - will FCC’s 
> lawyers spot it and respond to it as part of the NPRM?
>
> Hope this helps and with highest regards,
>
> -d.
> -- 
>
> Principal, LeadDoAdapt Ventures, Inc. <https://www.leaddoadapt.com/> & 
> Distinguished Fellow
>
> Henry S. Stimson Center <https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/>, 
> Business Executives for National Security 
> <https://bens.org/people/dr-david-bray/>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 2:15 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain 
> <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>     All:
>
>     I have spent the last several days reaching out to as many people I
>     know with a deep understanding of the policy and technical issues
>     surrounding the internet, to participate on this list. I encourage you
>     all to reach out on your own, especially to those that you can
>     constructively and civilly disagree with, and hopefully work with, to
>     establish technical steps forward. Quite a few have joined silently!
>     So far, 168 people have joined!
>
>     Please welcome Dr David Bray[1], a self-described "human flack jacket"
>     who, in the last NN debate, stood up for the non -partisan FCC IT team
>     that successfully kept the system up 99.4% of the time despite the
>     comment floods and network abuses from all sides. He has shared with
>     me privately many sad (and some hilarious!) stories of that era, and I
>     do kind of hope now, that some of that history surfaces, and we can
>     learn from it.
>
>     Thank you very much, David, for putting down your painful memories[2],
>     and agreeing to join here. There is a lot to tackle here, going
>     forward.
>
>     [1] https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/
>     [2] "Pain shared is reduced. Joy shared, increased." - Spider Robinson
>
>
>     -- 
>     Oct 30:
>     https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>     Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>     _______________________________________________
>     Nnagain mailing list
>     Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
>     https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
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