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

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

Christian,

we might be looking through opposite ends of this tunnel.....

--On 16. oktober 2003 15:15 -0700 Christian Huitema 
<huitema at windows.microsoft.com> wrote:

>> 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.
>
> Well, to paraphrase a well known leader, "the IETF, how many divisions?"
> The gist of this comment is that someone developing a network
> application protocol ought to somehow get a blessing from the IETF.
> Reality check. Who got the IETF approval to deploy ICQ, Kazaa, or for
> that matter HTTP?

For application protocols, I view it in the opposite direction - if someone 
comes to the IETF and *asks* for the IETF's advice, blessing or ownership, 
what are the conditions under which we say "yes"? Or "no"?

For those that never ask, and never become important, I say "not my 
problem". The number of application protocols with the oomph to "break" the 
Internet is quite small - offhand, I'd say that HTTP/1.0 probably was the 
closest try.

> If the Internet is so fragile that a poorly developed application can
> break it, then the IETF response should not be to try control each
> application. It has to be, design checks that can be implemented by
> cooperating hosts and routers so that their neck of the Internet is in
> good health!

Now there's an idea..... :-)

The flipside is of course with those things that are *already* under IETF 
control, or critical for our infrastructure, for some reason. The 
abstracted version of the fights over MIME types, URI schemes, SIP 
extension etcetera seems to be "don't extend until you've talked to us 
about what you're doing, and if we don't like it, don't try to pretend that 
we did" (the P-headers, vnd. MIME types and the proposed faceted URI 
schemes); I'm not certain what the abstracted version of the fights over 
COPS, CR-LDP, RSVP-TE and so on are.....

The IETF has got fewer divisions than the Pope, of course. Anyone is free 
to ignore us. And we need to remember that, sometimes.