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

2003-10-16 02:52:39
Eric,

--On 15. oktober 2003 12:57 -0400 Eric Rosen <erosen(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> 
wrote:

Well, let's test this assertion.  Suppose a consortium of electric
companies develops a UDP-based protocol  for monitoring and controlling
street lights. It turns  out that  this protocol generates  an unbounded
amount  of traffic (say,  proportional to  the square  of the  number of
street lights  in the world), has no  congestion control, and no
security, but  is expected to run over the Internet.

According to you, this has nothing to  do with the IETF.  It might result
in the congestive collapse of the Internet,  but who cares, the IETF
doesn't do street  lights.  I would  like  to see  the  criteria  which
determine  that telephones belong on the Internet but street lights don't!

thanks for making the most concise statement of the conflict here in the discussion so far! 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.

In the discussions leading up to this document, we actually had 3 different other levels of "inclusivity" up for consideration:

- "Everything that runs over the Internet is appropriate for IETF standardization". Obviously, that might cause some reactions from organizations like the W3C, OMG, ISO, ITU, the power grid standardizers, the bank transaction standardizers and others.... even if the IETF were able to gather the required competence, it's hard to see how we could build a management structure that could handle "everything".

- "Everything that needs open, documented interoperability and runs over the Internet is appropriate for IETF standardization". A bit smaller, but still huge, and hard to draw boundaries around. Advantage: Everything we currently work on is unquestionably part of the IETF's scope.

- "Everything that builds infrastructures on the Internet that needs to be open and interoperable is appropriate for IETF standardization". This would place SMTP, DNS and LDAP (in the original vision) inside the IETF's sphere, but would leave the traffic lights (and the current way LDAP is used) outside it.

- "Everything that can seriously impact the Internet is appropriate for IETF standardization". Argues for keeping HTTP and DNS, would include your hypothetical traffic lights, but would probably leave POP/IMAP out, and leaves people arguing about both SIP and L3VPN.

- "For the Internet" - only the stuff that is directly involved in making the Internet work is included in the IETF's scope.

It's far from clear in my mind what the right thing is, or what the appropriate path forward is if the IETF regards its purpose as being one or the other - we might, for instance, decide that we standardize stuff that needs to be open and interoperable, but have different evaluation criteria for those things than for those things that "make the Internet work", and will dispose our resources accordingly - I don't know. And if we decide that certain things we currently do are outside our scope, we've got a responsibility to make sure the work effort is handled in a responsible fashion.

But it's relatively clear to my mind that continuing to have both sides of a discussion argue based on "the mission of the IETF", with conflicting definitions, is not the best thing for the Internet.

So - rather than stating something completely vague, we put out a proposal. If it's the wrong proposal, it should be changed. But please be specific about what you think it should be changed to.

makes sense?

                 Harald






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