Perhaps we all agree that standardization without some sort of conformance
verification is ineffective.
The only problem with that assessment is 25 years of Internet experience,
all of which was based of no conformance verification, but quite a bit of
effectiveness.
there's more than one kind of effectiveness. effectiveness at getting
a technology deployed is quite different from effectiveness of that
technology (once deployed) at supporting reliable operation for a
variety of applications.
Just to pick a small example: MIME has been out for nearly 10 years and
I'm still receiving, on a daily basis, MIME attachments that are
unreadable because they lack proper content-type labelling.
That's not what I would call "effective".
Keith