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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