Behalf Of Spencer Dawkins
Call me a dreamer, but if there's one voice (which may or may not be
from another planet) in a working group, the chair's
responsibility is
to decide if this is one of the hopefully rare cases where one voice
SHOULD derail apparent consensus, and if it's not - to say so!
The problem I was thinking of was more of the pre-consensus type. Where
you have one or two persons banging on ad-nauseam claiming that a
proposal is going to cripple large ISPs, one or two people from those
large ISPs saying 'that is not a problem' and a lot of folk who don't
want to comment on the issue because they don't feel they understand it.
I think that when you are talking about alleged show stopper issues you
have to take into account the affiliations of the people raising the
issues if you are going to arrive at a deployable spec in a timely
manner.
I understand the apparent advantage of saying, "well, if X
says it's a
good idea, X is from a large ISP, so they are probably right", but
this doesn't prevent the second-order problem that large companies
(ISPs or not) have a range of employee IQs, and if you defer
to one of
the low-order IQs because they work for Y, you may STILL end up in a
bad place. I've seen this bad place personally.
That depends on the nature of the show stopper. If the product manager
for Yahoo mail says that an issue that has been raised by others as a
show stopper for large installations is not a problem and nobody else in
a similar position contradicts them then I tend to think that its their
funeral if they turn out to be wrong.
If on the other hand you have the CTO, VP of Research and Principal
Scientist of a major Internet infrastructure company all saying that
there is a major show stopper for them and that they won't be able to
deploy for several years unless there is a change, I think a group
really needs to be able to take the source of the objection into
account.
I would hope that we evaluate ideas based on the message in most
cases, and not on the messenger. If that's not what we do in most
cases, I THINK this is a pretty fundamental change in how the IETF
works.
I agree this is so in most cases. The problem is that the system does
not provide a mechanism for the occasional exception that may be needed.
The approach that I have seen be most effective in bringing about
infrastructure changes in the Internet has been to get the major
stakeholders around a table and get them to put on record their criteria
for adoption of some new infrastructure.
One model would be to hold such meetings under IETF aegis, another would
be to do as was done for email authentication and hold a series of
meetings in a range of forums in the hope that the requirements would
somehow trickle down to the working group.
The first approach would be a major change to the IETF, the second
approach may be the reason for various countries complaining that they
are effectively excluded from the Internet Governance process. The ad
hoc groups very rarely extend beyond North America and when they do it
is often only to include other parts of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora.
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