IESG proposed statement on the IETF mission

Simon Woodside sbwoodside at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 17 03:30:10 CEST 2003


On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 12:57  PM, Eric Rosen wrote:

>
>> "The purpose of  the IETF is to create high  quality, relevant, and 
>> timely
>> standards for the Internet."
>
>> It is important that this is "For the Internet," and does not include
>> everything that happens to use IP.  IP is being used in a myriad of
>> real-world applications, such as controlling street lights, but the
>> IETF does not standardize those applications.

Yes, and towards a possibly more contentious application, see Voice 
over IP. Lots of VoIP work is being done without involving the internet 
at all. Used by telecoms for telecoms applications, where "best effort" 
isn't good enough because it needs to keep working when the power goes 
out. IP, yes, Internet, no.

Against that you have "voice over internet" which is AKA "voice chat" 
and already abounds in true internet p2p apps like iChat, GnomeMeeting, 
and some programs on that other OS. These run on the public internet 
and benefit from the IETF design paradigms like edge-to-edge (aka 
end2end) and best effort but also have to accept the relevant drawbacks.

simon

> 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!
>
> Another problem  with your  formulation is that  the Internet is  a 
> growing,
> changing, entity,  so "for the Internet"  often means "for what  I 
> think the
> Internet  should  be  in  a  few  years", and  this  is  then  a  
> completely
> unobjective criterion.  One  would hope instead that the  IETF would 
> want to
> encourage competition between different  views of Internet evolution, 
> as the
> competition of ideas is the way to make progress.
>
> I also do not understand whether "for the Internet" means something 
> different
> than "for IP networking" or not.
>
> I think  it should  also be part  of the  mission to produce  
> standards that
> facilitate the migration to IP  of applications and infrastructures 
> that use
> legacy networking  technologies.  Such  migration seems to  be good  
> for the
> Internet, but I don't know if it is "for the Internet" or not.
>
>

--
www.simonwoodside.com :: www.openict.net :: www.semacode.org
                     99% Devil, 1% Angel



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