IETF mission boundaries (Re: IESG proposed statement on the IETF mission )

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

Eric,

--On 15. oktober 2003 12:57 -0400 Eric Rosen <erosen at cisco.com> wrote:

> Well, let's test this assertion.  Suppose a consortium of electric
> companies develops a UDP-based protocol  for monitoring and controlling
> street lights. It turns  out that  this protocol generates  an unbounded
> amount  of traffic (say,  proportional to  the square  of the  number of
> street lights  in the world), has no  congestion control, and no
> security, but  is expected to run over the Internet.
>
> According to you, this has nothing to  do with the IETF.  It might result
> in the congestive collapse of the Internet,  but who cares, the IETF
> doesn't do street  lights.  I would  like  to see  the  criteria  which
> determine  that telephones belong on the Internet but street lights don't!

thanks for making the most concise statement of the conflict here in the 
discussion so far!
I think this point is one of the critical causes of conflict when talking 
about the IETF mission - and unless we lance the boil, actually talk about 
it, and attempt to *resolve* the issue, we will go on revisiting the issue 
forever, with nothing but wasted energy to show for it.

In the discussions leading up to this document, we actually had 3 different 
other levels of "inclusivity" up for consideration:

- "Everything that runs over the Internet is appropriate for IETF 
standardization". Obviously, that might cause some reactions from 
organizations like the W3C, OMG, ISO, ITU, the power grid standardizers, 
the bank transaction standardizers and others.... even if the IETF were 
able to gather the required competence, it's hard to see how we could build 
a management structure that could handle "everything".

- "Everything that needs open, documented interoperability and runs over 
the Internet is appropriate for IETF standardization". A bit smaller, but 
still huge, and hard to draw boundaries around. Advantage: Everything we 
currently work on is unquestionably part of the IETF's scope.

- "Everything that builds infrastructures on the Internet that needs to be 
open and interoperable is appropriate for IETF standardization". This would 
place SMTP, DNS and LDAP (in the original vision) inside the IETF's sphere, 
but would leave the traffic lights (and the current way LDAP is used) 
outside it.

- "Everything that can seriously impact the Internet is appropriate for 
IETF standardization". Argues for keeping HTTP and DNS, would include your 
hypothetical traffic lights, but would probably leave POP/IMAP out, and 
leaves people arguing about both SIP and L3VPN.

- "For the Internet" - only the stuff that is directly involved in making 
the Internet work is included in the IETF's scope.

It's far from clear in my mind what the right thing is, or what the 
appropriate path forward is if the IETF regards its purpose as being one or 
the other - we might, for instance, decide that we standardize stuff that 
needs to be open and interoperable, but have different evaluation criteria 
for those things than for those things that "make the Internet work", and 
will dispose our resources accordingly - I don't know. And if we decide 
that certain things we currently do are outside our scope, we've got a 
responsibility to make sure the work effort is handled in a responsible 
fashion.

But it's relatively clear to my mind that continuing to have both sides of 
a discussion argue based on "the mission of the IETF", with conflicting 
definitions, is not the best thing for the Internet.

So - rather than stating something completely vague, we put out a proposal. 
If it's the wrong proposal, it should be changed. But please be specific 
about what you think it should be changed to.

makes sense?

                  Harald