Why the IETF Isn't Working 103
An anonymous reader writes "Vidya Narayanan spent seven years working on the Internet Engineering Task Force, and was nominated for the Internet Architecture Board. But she declined the nomination and left the IETF because standards bodies are not able to keep up with the rapid pace of tech development. She says, '[W]hile the pace at which standards are written hasn't changed in many years, the pace at which the real world adopts software has become orders of magnitude faster. Standards, unfortunately, have become the playground for hashing out conflicts and carrying out silo-ed agendas and as a result, have suffered a drastic degradation. ... Running code and rough consensus, the motto of the IETF, used to be realizable at some point. Nowadays, it is as though Margaret Thatcher's words, "consensus is the lack of leadership" have come to life. In the name of consensus, we debate frivolous details forever. In the name of patents, we never finish. One recent case in point is the long and painful codec battles in the WebRTC working group.'"
Re:Corporatization (Score:5, Informative)
For an example on the "speed and effectiveness" of corporate standard setting, you need look no further than the Microsoft designed "OOXML" standard. It's greased rails acceptance over the loud protests of competent engineers, and the political process abuse that led to its acceptance, led to Microsoft tools being labeled as "standards compliant" when they clearly did not even follow the OOXML standards that were railroaded through ISO acceptance.
That event led a lot of people to _resign_ from ISO, because the "corporate speed" led to a badly fractured standard which not even its own sponsoring compoany followed or could hope to follow.