Complaint to IAB regarding IESG decisions (Daniel J. Bernstein) - 2025-10-24
Email: Re: Complaint to IAB regarding IESG decisions - 2025-11-27

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>
Subject: [IAB] Re: Complaint to IAB regarding IESG decisions
Date: November 27, 2025 at 4:03:03 AM PST
To: iab@iab.org
Cc: ietf@ietf.org

Dear IAB, cc'ing ietf@ietf.org for transparency:

This is a followup to report further damage caused by the IESG actions
covered in https://cr.yp.to/2025/20251024-rules.pdf, which IAB still
hasn't handled even though I filed it more than a month ago.

One of the topics I covered there was "Threatening list bans". I quoted
IESG threatening 30-day bans of IETF participants who exercise their BCP
78 opt-out rights. Here's the quote again: "Repeated inclusion of such
notices may be considered a disruption and moderated per RFC 2418/RFC
3934 and the IESG Statement on Disruptive Posting".

There has still been no explanation of whether IESG is going to demand
deletion of RFC 5831 and of many other IETF postings that exercise their
BCP 78 opt-out rights. Meanwhile RFC 3934 is limited to disruption "of
the WG process". IESG's 2006 "Statement on Disruptive Posting" does not
have this limit---but also has no authority under IETF policy.

The new damage is as follows. In public email dated 25 Nov 2025 19:20:40
+0000, the ietf@ietf.org censors announced that I had been "partially
suspended from posting to ietf@ietf.org for a period of 30 days" because
of "continued derivative rights claims".

The censors did not claim that this action was authorized by RFC 9245.
Recall that RFC 9245 allows the censors to act only in cases "when the
content is inappropriate and represents a pattern of abuse"; the censors
did not issue the absurd claim that exercising BCP 78 opt-out rights "is
inappropriate and represents a pattern of abuse". Instead the censors
cited IESG's threatened list ban for the claim that BCP 78 opt-outs "are
considered disruptive" (in the words of the censors). The censors didn't
even claim that the opt-outs are disruptive; the censors are just
following orders from IESG.

Since it's clear that this damage is a consequence of the IESG actions
that I've appealed to IAB, I believe it's appropriate for me to simply
notify you of the damage, asking you to reverse this specific censor
action as a consequence of reversing the IESG action, rather than
separately appealing this specific censor action.

---D. J. Bernstein

===== NOTICES =====

This document may not be modified, and derivative works of it may not be
created, and it may not be published except as an Internet-Draft. (That
sentence is the official language from IETF's "Legend Instructions" for
the situation that "the Contributor does not wish to allow modifications
nor to allow publication as an RFC". I'm fine with redistribution of
copies of this document; the issue is with modification.)