I strongly disagree. IETF essentially "owns" the Internet Protocol
specification and has change control over it.
Well, I still disagree, but at least you've taken a step in the right
direction by being more specific. Internet Architecture is an amorphous
blob.
A small group individuals with a cute idea can have dramatic impact,
no matter what the IETF thinks. Witness WWW and NAT.
no argument that such a group can have "dramatic impact" (for good
or ill) but that's not the same thing as changing the architecture.
Today we have transparent proxies, reverse caches, global DNS redirectors,
and all sorts of other amusing Things. You can say they're not part of the
architecture. But what does it mean? They're there because the
functionality needs to be there and otherwise wasn't. The same could be
said about NATs, as bad as they are. Remember Ritchie's famous quote, "you
can fill a void and it could still suck"? The fact is X is here as opposed
to something better.
Did the people at MIT have the right to write X???