Subject: RE: [newtrk] Re: Why old-standards (Re: List of Old Standards to be retired)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 05:57:06 -0800

> From: Keith Moore [mailto:[email-masked]] 

> >> While updating RFC 2026, better also to make the second 
> step and say 
> >> that "having the IETF continue to do one thing according 
> to the RFCs 
> >> and the rest of the world doing something else is not a good thing 
> >> either for the Internet (what ever the "Internet" may then 
> mean since 
> >> IETF says it is the adherence to its Internet documents).
> >
> > A bad thing for whom? It is certainly bad for the IETF but 
> the world 
> > is probably choosing the course it has because that is what is best 
> > for it.
> 
> not clear.  blind faith in the market is misplaced.  at least in the 
> short term, the market uses a hill-climbing strategy.  it's good for 
> finding local maxima, not good for finding optimal solutions.

And the IETF maintains the fiction that members represent nobody but
themselves and thus ends up with specs that represent the interests of
nobody but a collection of 30 or so people who were in the room, people who
really really like fiddling with computers and don't understand that the
majority of people just want them to work.

> 3. when "the world" insists on doing something that is shortsighted 
> (e.g. NATs), IETF can provide useful guidance of the form "if 
> you must 
> do this harmful thing, here is how you can minimize the harm" (but it 
> needs to be clearly labeled as such)

NATs are the only viable way to deploy IPv6.

Firewalls are one of the few working Internet security measures. The IETF
has produced little of value in the field of Internet security. Yet it
insists of holding every idea hostage to a set of fifteen year old dogmas
that were never valid.

You write the dogmas after the Internet is secure, not before. 

> 4. even if IETF provided the wisest possible guidance, there 
> are times 
> when "the world" would not accept it.  from this point of 
> view, IETF's 
> job is to supply guidance that (a) "the world" will accept, and (b) 
> provides a path that allows "the world" to move to a saner state when 
> it is ready to do so.

And why should the world follow the advice of an organization that pointedly
refuses to engage with it? Not only does the IETF refuse to listen to the
world, it makes little effort to speak. 

It is very easy to push aside the guidance that the IETF might want to give,
one of the reasons it is easy is that the IETF has lots of standards from
the teletype era of computing but has yet to ratify HTTP 1.1 as a standard.

.
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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:09:23 -0500

[bcc'ed to newtrk since I don't think we want to go off on this tangent 
on the list]

> majority of people just want them to work.

I don't think IETF collectively maintains any set of beliefs, fictional 
or otherwise.  There are too many "new" participants for there to be 
much resembling a collective mindset in IETF.

anyway, bashing IETF probably won't help much here - most of us are 
working under the assumption that IETF can {once agan, continue to} do 
useful things if it tweaks its process.

>> (e.g. NATs), IETF can provide useful guidance of the form "if  you 
>> must  do this harmful thing, here is how you can minimize the harm" 
>> (but it needs to be clearly labeled as such)
>

(not to get off on a tangent, but I have yet to see a NAT that helped 
to deploy IPv6...perhaps you could enlighten me in private email?)

if you don't accept NATs as a shortsighted thing that the world chose, 
I'm sure you can find another example.

>> 4. even if IETF provided the wisest possible guidance, there are 
>> times when "the world" would not accept it.  from this point of view, 
>> IETF's job is to supply guidance that (a) "the world" will accept, 
>> and (b) provides a path that allows "the world" to move to a saner 
>> state when it is ready to do so.
>

IETF certainly speaks via RFCs.  for better or worse, IETF doesn't have 
any way to speak as one voice without getting rough consensus first.  
and that generally looks like publishing an RFC (though of course, not 
all RFCs have rough consensus)

> the teletype era of computing but has yet to ratify HTTP 1.1 as a 

that speaks more about the complexity of HTTP 1.1 and the difficulty of 
advancing complex specifications than it does about IETF in general.  
if HTTP 1.1 were 20 pages long it would have been a standard long ago.  
(and one reason HTTP 1.1 is so long because it tries to reconcile "the 
world's" poorly chosen changes to HTTP 1.0 with technical sanity)

Keith

.