DNT Group Abandons July Deadline

The working group doesn’t need an affirmative stakeholder vote to continue working, as a decision to terminate DNT discussions would have to come from the W3C, staff told stakeholders in emails and during the call. “At some point we have to agree, or get a majority of stakeholders to move forward,” said group co-Chairman Matthias Schunter during the call. “A working group consisting of only two chairs doesn’t make sense.” Stakeholders are “basically all being dared to quit,” said Aleecia McDonald, director-privacy at Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society. That’s a “very interesting structure,” she said. Mayer -- a Stanford graduate student and active participant in online tracking initiatives -- said he found that idea “really uncomfortable.” The working group’s “very legitimacy derives in large measure from agreement between disparate viewpoints,” he said: If stakeholders leave the process, so does that legitimacy.

The W3C “moved the goalpost” by saying stakeholders could not determine whether to move forward in the process, Mayer told us. The fact that stakeholders were not given the chance to vote on a path forward -- as they expected they would be -- is “very frustrating,” Mayer said: “I don’t think it’s in line with what we've heard” from the W3C up until now. “They took the decision away from the group,” possibly because the W3C suspected stakeholders would vote to discontinue the discussions, he said. “There is a lot at stake for the W3C for this process to be seen as a success,” Alan Chapell, stakeholder and vice chairman of the Network Advertising Initiative’s board, told us. “I think their intention is to drag this along.” W3C staff did not immediately comment.

The group completed the call without voting on a new working draft. During the call, Schunter said the group should move forward with the plan recently laid out by the co-chairs when they rejected a proposal from the online advertising industry (CD July 17 p9). “From my perspective, the path to continue is to take the draft and change proposals and go one-by-one, have an opportunity to be done in a finite time,” Schunter said. “Currently we are in better shape than we have ever been before, because we have concrete change proposals in writing and can now process each of these alternatives.” Stakeholders questioned how long this approach would realistically take. “Is there an estimate as to how long it would take us if we go down this path?” asked Consumer Watchdog Director of Privacy John Simpson. If there are more than 20 unaddressed change proposals, and each proposal takes one week to address, it would take more than 20 weeks before the group could produce the Last Call document it was supposed to have produced by the end of this month, he said. And attempting to resolve one change proposal per week is “particularly optimistic,” he said.

It’s also unclear what amendments will be allowed going forward, Mayer said. The co-chairs’ decision to reject the industry proposal included language prohibiting “change proposals that are merely re-statements” of elements from the industry proposal, but Schunter said during the call that he didn’t “want to blacklist all [industry] text because it was not the preference of the group.” It “wouldn’t be fair to not consider perfecting amendments and change proposals,” he said.

The process has hit a stalemate, Mayer said, echoing sentiments other stakeholders have expressed to us. “I've heard it been described as ‘a game of chicken,'” Mayer said, because each group of stakeholders is afraid if they leave the table, a DNT mechanism will be shaped by whomever is left. But “I don’t see how anyone can stay in the group under these conditions,” he said, speculating that the privacy advocates might be the first to leave, which would significantly detract from the legitimacy of the process. If the group were to disband through stakeholder attrition, browsers would likely continue to be the driving force behind online tracking countermeasures, he continued.

The next meeting could be as late as Sept. 4, said the meeting’s minutes and emails from W3C staff. Staff emailed the group, asking them to respond to a poll about availability for a call on Aug. 14, after stakeholders said during the call that stakeholders may be unavailable next month. August is “a horrible month for having substantive discussions,” said Chris Mejia, a technical director at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, on the call. Without co-Chairman Peter Swire -- who told the group he will remove himself from the process for the next few weeks to handle personal commitments -- leading the group, it’s unlikely that a potential August call would get to substantive discussions about the W3C process or a path forward, Mayer said. Practically, the next real discussion will be in September, he continued. Chapell predicted that the next call -- whether in August or September -- is “going to be a lot like this phone call.”