what are the real problems

Geoff Huston gih at telstra.net
Fri May 23 11:04:50 CEST 2003


At 10:01 AM 22/05/2003 -0400, Eric Rosen wrote:

>It would certainly be interesting to  know exactly which of the IESG members
>think that they  are on a mission to protect  the users against exploitation
>by the  vendors.  Naturally, anyone who is  on such a mission  will think it
>very important to  replace the operation of the  marketplace by his personal
>vision of the future, and will do whatever he can to purge the IETF of other
>views.   But let's not  pretend that  such an  overtly political  agenda has
>anything to do with technical quality.
>
>And people still wonder why the IESG is not trusted!

On the other hand the IETF still manages to undertake a certain amount of
Bad Idea filtering, and the criteria for a Bad Idea has some reference to
a generic engineering model of the Internet as we know it. Markets are not
usually seen as discriminators of quality, and invoking the market as some
discriminator of technical quality for this work is not a view that I can agree
with.

If the only role of the IETF is to bless the offerings from certain vendors
who hold significant market share and to soundly rubbish offerings from
those vendors to whom the Market has shown displeasure, then
we are all wasting our time. From that perspective I find I simply cannot
accept Eric's perspective that the operation of the marketplace
Knows Best, for in that world there is no credible role for interoperable
standards, no opportunity for customers being able to make independent
choices of technology and vendor, and, as far as I can tell, we are
then pretty much back to the bleak mainframe years of the 70s where
vendor abuse of customers through lock-in with proprietary technology
was a common mode of operation. i.e. the role here (among others) is
to balance the various perspectives of vendors and consumers, and in such a
role one cannot ignore the legitimate interests of either sector. I would be
very reluctant to characterize this important role as being "a mission
to protect the users from exploitation by the vendors", but I do see that part
of the rationale of the existence of the IETF is to provide a means of
balancing the various interests of consumers and competing vendors when
defining rational, useful and, hopefully, high quality, technology standards.

regards,

   Geoff






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