Subject: "X is happening, therefore the IETF must deal with it sooner or later"

From: "Mike O'Dell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 11:17:45 -0400 (EDT)

pursuing this line of reasoning, the IETF will be approached to
standardized protocols for the exchange of stolen goods between
muggers and fences, not to mention the protocol of muggings themselves.

this is utterly fantastic!

as i said before, the fact that some people want to do something
very wrong in the name of an imagined benefit is no justification
for the IETF aiding and abetting the wrong.

yes, this is religion, or at least "design morality".  design
decisions occassionally require the application of taste and
that's what's at stake here.

further, posing this as a referendum on application protocols
is utterly specious.  the fact that the IETF doesn't chose to
participate in any particular effort, OPES or otherwise, can
in no way be construed as IETF's unwillingness to work on
application protocols that are in line with the design tenets
that got the Internet this far.

OPES is a thinly-veiled attempt to push functionality
back "into the cloud".  We *know* this is simply dead wrong.

worse, it can lead to an industry of "services" middlemen
who create for themselves an attachment to the food chain
where they can "extract value" at will without the consent
of either end of the connection.  i find this very, very
disturbing.

as for creating a more "application-friendly Internet", the
Internet is already as application-friendly as it ought to
be.  you need NO permission from anyone to try any application
you like.

of course, the laws of Nature which determine whether your
application will work "at Big-I Internet scale" are not subject
to suplication. Therefore, your architecture had best be
consistent with those rules and not rely on the instituationalize
application of grey tape to operate.

i guess the question is that if this effort is so compelling,
why aren't people off "just doing it" instead of championing
a debate over whether they can start?  again, you don't
need the IETF to do real work - in fact, real work is
almost always best done elsewhere.

	cheers,

	-Mike O'Dell
	Resident Crank