On 22-jun-04, at 21:57, Vernon Schryver wrote:
If you want to buy a car and ask if it has air bags and nobody can
give you a definite answer, would you buy the car if it is important
to
you to have an air bag?
Buging a car with a feature with well defined characteristics is quite
different from buying Internet services which don't even have common
names.
But that's just a detail. The real difference is that you can buy a car
anywhere on the landmass of your choice and then bring it to whereever
you want to use it on that same landmass. With IP service, you're
limited to whatever is available in a certain place. Usually the choice
is between too expensive and/or too slow (dial-up and GPRS and the
like) and broken (most hotel broadband and wifi hotspots).
It is not the job of the IETF to try to stop anyone from selling
services that differ from what we used to get via NSF any more than
it is the job of the IETF to prevent the sales of NAT boxes and PPPoE,
I disagree. If the IETF were in the position to influence people, it
should certainly do so. What good is it to standardize protocols that
can't be deployed because network operators build networks that can't
support them? Unfortunately, there are usually reasons for implementing
breakage, and wisdom from the IETF isn't going to remove those reasons,
so we shouldn't expect miracles.
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