Subject: Re: Internet Society joins Liberty Alliance Management Board: Why?

From: Eran Hammer-Lahav <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2009 20:07:37 -0700

My concern regarding this announcement is the fact that it gives support to a misguided effort by Liberty Alliance. I think it is somewhat irresponsible for the ISOC to actively support an effort without first engaging the community at large to fully understand the dynamics of the identity communities involved.

The people behind the IDtbd effort have been going around trying to sell this effort for a while. The reality is that at this point, the communities behind two of the most successful identity related protocols, OAuth and OpenID, have rejected this effort by Liberty, including many of the individual companies that support these communities.

I find it personally offensive that Liberty have been going behind the OAuth's community's back trying get corporations to move their OAuth and OpenID efforts to IDtbd instead of the communities that drive these efforts forward.

IDtbd is an effort to create a full-blown standard body to manage all identity related protocols, with its own set of IPR rules, process, and governance. They seek to nullify existing communities by positioning themselves as the authority in the space. Supporting this effort directly contradicts the current IETF effort to form an OAuth working group.

EHL

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From: Leslie Daigle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:40:12 -0500

As Lynn mentioned in her message, ISOC has been building up more 
technical programmes over the course of the last couple of years.  I 
want to take the opportunity to say a bit more about that, as an 
indirect way of addressing the issue of what types of decisions are 
being made, and what the intended implications are.

First, ISOC is dedicated to keeping the Internet development model open 
and functioning, and it is dedicated to supporting the IETF.

A couple of things that this means in practice are that ISOC develops 
messaging for the non-IETF, not-always-technical communities pointing 
out the strengths and virtues of the Internet's open development model, 
and the appropriate venues for carrying out policy and technical 
discussions.  And then we go out and work with different groups, in 
various ways, to get that message across.  You can see some examples of 
that in our contributions to the ITU-T World Telecomms Standards 
Assembly meeting in Johannesburg last year -- fact sheets on Internet 
standards (pointing to the IETF), IPv6 policy (pointing to the RIRs for 
regional policy discussions), etc.

http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/governance/itu-wtsa_2008.shtml
http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/ISOC-WTSA_20081017.pdf
http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/ISOC-ITU-ipv6_20081017.pdf

We're also doing work to raise awareness about critical issues facing 
the Internet.  As an example, I don't want to discuss an unannounced 
product ( ;-) ), but we're planning an IPv6 briefing  (targeted not at 
us engineers, but rather at the deploying world) in conjunction with IETF74.

These are things ISOC does to further its own mission of promoting the 
open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of 
all people throughout the world, and not because it is the 
organizational home of the IETF.

When we participate in IETF work, we (like everyone else) participate as 
individuals, and we work quite hard, internally, to make sure we don't 
presume a special role with the IETF in deciding its course.

And, if people want to know more about what we're up to, I'm always 
happy to come talk about it.

So, coming back to the issue at hand -- while it is unfortunate if ISOC 
winds up surprising the IETF leadership with its decisions, rather than 
being a decision made in ignorance of the state of technical discussions 
in the identity community, I believe that it was a decision made in 
consideration of the broader world of influences on open Internet 
development than are typically discussed within the IETF or any of the 
identity-specific development groups.

ISOC joined Liberty to have a voice in shaping the new organization to 
ensure that it is open, transparent, and not subject to capture by the 
interests of a single technology or community:  consistent with the 
Internet development model.  In the long run, we hope that various open 
efforts will gain a great deal by bringing their ideas and concerns into 
this process as it means that their work will get out to audiences along 
with the messages coming from large companies, technology partisans, etc.

 From our perspective, the time has come to move identity efforts to 
wider deployment, and they need to find a way to communicate both the 
importance of the solutions they offer and the ways that users can best 
manage both their own identity and the slew of new relationships that 
these technologies will enable.  I know Lucy is always looking for input 
-- providing some concrete input on how best to achieve this would 
certainly be considered helpful to ISOC.

And none of this should particularly challenge the IETF or any identity 
work it chooses to take on or not; you'll have seen at least two of us 
individuals raising our hands in support of the OAUTH work in the last BoF.

Thanks,
Leslie.

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Leslie Daigle
Chief Internet Technology Officer, ISOC
[email-masked]

Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

-- 

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Leslie Daigle
[email-masked]
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