Today, the IETF Turns 25 27
FranckMartin writes "Little known to the general public, the Internet Engineering Task Force celebrates its 25th birthday on the 16th of January. DNSSEC, IDN, SIP, IPv6, HTTP, MPLS ... all acronyms that were codified at the IETF. But little known, one can argue the IETF does not exist; it just happens that people meet 3 times a year in some hotel around the world and are on mailing lists in between. The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run, as well as the way the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been open to the civil society."
ICANN is open? (Score:2)
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Wouldn't things be much better and open if instead of ICANN or IETF we just had joint agreements between Comcast, ATT, Verizon, Time-Warner, and maybe Level3? I guess I should be international and include a few other "key players" in that list, too.
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Wouldn't things be much better and open if instead of ICANN or IETF
I'm OK with the IETF.
It is ICANN that has messed things up with their awful processes and back-room dealings.
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You should not have any problem with the IETF. They do virtually everything in the public. You may read the mailing lists, and contribute.
The standards created by the IETF are generally completely open by every definition, in that any part may participate in development, there is no restrictions of any kind on access to the standards text[1], and most do not require any patent licensing[2].
The IETF has also been generally fairly competent. They did screw up a bit with IPv6[3], but otherwise many of the stan
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Wouldn't things be much better and open if instead of ICANN or IETF we just had joint agreements between Comcast, ATT, Verizon, Time-Warner, and maybe Level3? I guess I should be international and include a few other "key players" in that list, too.
It is called the ITU!
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ICANN has a history of antipathy toward public participation.
Kieren McCarthy, who has alternately been a journalist covering ICANN and also worked as ICANN's , general manager of public participation, has very good commentary on ICANNs merits (there are a few) and foibles (there are many):
http://kierenmccarthy.com/category/internet-governance/icann/ [kierenmccarthy.com]
Oh, the pain (Score:2)
My brain melted trying to comprehend that summary on a Sunday morning.
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lol - try reading one of their RFC's!
try writing one! The XML format for authoring an RFC is ridiculous!
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Having authored several internet drafts, I found the XML format perfectly reasonable.
The IETF is engineering for the long term future. If the RFCs were written in some proprietary format, many would be effectively unreadable today. Imagine if they had decided to standardize on Framemaker or Wordperfect 25 years ago. Instead, the decision to use plain ASCII text for the corpus of RFCs means that we will be able to read these documents for the foreseeable future.
ASCII text isn't perfect. Tables and diagrams a
Huh? (Score:2)
I'm sorry, what? Who?
Why did you wake me up?
Re:IETF doesn't exist (Score:5, Informative)
The IETF exists in the same way that Debian Project exists, as an unregistered association of individuals, who operate under specific rules created by consensus. However, not being a legal entity in and of themselves, they each have umbrella organizations, namely Software in the Public Interest and the Internet Society, respectively. Both umbrella organizations encompass multiple other proects in addition to Debian and IETF.
The only notable difference is that while the Debian Project has clearly defined members (the Debian Developers), the IETF does not. On the other hand Debian relies heavily on individuals who are not members, making even this distinction smaller than it may seem.
Re:IETF doesn't exist (Score:4, Interesting)
The IETF does not legally exist, and has no members (legal or otherwise). The IETF Trust does legally exit, to hold IETF copyrights and trademarks, and ISOC (a 501(3)c charity) serves to support the IETF, although there is nothing legally binding the IETF to ISOC (nor could there be, as non-existant entities cannot enter into binding contracts).
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Which is very similar to the Debian Project, since it also does not legally exist. While it does have membership as I pointed out, it does not really mean that much since it is highly reliant on non-members. (The IETF is obviously entirely reliant on non-members since it has no members).
SPI (Software in the Public Interest) serves both roles (to hold the trademarks and other resources including funds, as well as to provide support) for Debian, which likewise has no binding legal ties to SPI, and could not h
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Or, to put it another way, the IETF does not exist in the same way that the Debian Project does not exist.
There are evidently classes of non-existance, as the IETF does not not exist in the same way that (say) Rivendell does not exist.
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Well, there is the International Essential Tremor Foundation [essentialtremor.org].
That is a rather different IETF.
ICANT (Score:5, Insightful)
The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run,
Yes, I believe for the ICANN people, it served as a giant lighthouse warning petty tyrants of the dangers of open, collaborative design processes. Since ICANN took office, domain name registration has become horribly convoluted, the prices have gone up, lawsuits abound, and we're now in danger of running out of real estate (IPv4 addresses), while they sit on their arse and worry about copyright. They're like a HOA -- they're fining people left and right and ordering them to take down christmas decorations, flags, and people who dare to paint their house in an unapproved color, while they forget to spend money on things like garbage collection, road repair, and snow removal.
No, actually, they ARE the internet's HOA, and about as bloody useful.
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What does ICANN have to do with IPv4 running out? IP is IETF territory, and the IETF has done it's job by putting IPv6 out there.
IPv6 adoption is now a business problem, and you can see the lack of business innovation in that space.
all proposals must have working prototypes before? (Score:1)
This sentence in the article is no longer true. There was a time when people coded stuff, then wrote an I-D to document it. The problem is that the burden of having at least 2 implementations is only to promote an RFC to the Draft Standard level, which is less and less frequent.
This is a real problem, because some of the bugs in an RFC can only be found by testing two implementations against each other. Unfortunately my last tentative to improve this was rejected:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf [ietf.org]