diff --git a/docs/proposed/http-storage-node-protocol.rst b/docs/proposed/http-storage-node-protocol.rst
index 47f94db49..bc44468a6 100644
--- a/docs/proposed/http-storage-node-protocol.rst
+++ b/docs/proposed/http-storage-node-protocol.rst
@@ -380,8 +380,7 @@ then the expiration time of that lease will be changed to 31 days after the time
 If it does not match an existing lease
 then a new lease will be created with this ``renew-secret`` which expires 31 days after the time of this operation.
 
-The renew and cancel secrets must be 32 bytes long
-(or in the case of JSON encoding they must UTF-8 encode to 32 bytes).
+The renew and cancel secrets must be 32 bytes long.
 The server treats them as opaque values.
 :ref:`Share Leases` gives details about how the Tahoe-LAFS storage client constructs these values.