At 1:50 PM -0700 9/15/05, Michael Thomas wrote:
Always the risk when one is being flippant, but I only
meant that the world outside of ietf seems to be taking
on a lot of these issues without ietf's advice and consent.
Fully agree.
In this case, there is no advantage to the developer of the
protocol to have it worked on in the IETF, nor even published as an
RFC. It came out of one person's head, he was able to experiment
with it live on the net, and he retains the ability to tweak the
specs whenever he feels like it. It has worked remarkably well,
given the variety of clients and servers available for the
protocol, and the huge amount of traffic that is moved daily over
it.
Which is pretty much the elephant in the room, I'd say. How
much of the net traffic these days is, essentially, not in
any way standardized, and in fact probably considers ietf
old and in the way?
Not sure why this is an elephant; who cares? I have seen numbers that
show that a huge percentage of traffic is P2P of various flavors, but
I haven't seen anyone saying that this is having any negative
effects. BitTorrent in specific spreads out the traffic by making
many receivers senders as well, so the traffic isn't all concentrated
on one point. Many music traders (such as myself) leave the torrent
running after we have gotten all the content because that helps
reduce the load on the originator so he/she can originate more music,
and because we have spare bandwidth. The fact that this helps spread
the load on the Internet is nice, but probably not important to 99%
of traders.
(Right about now, someone from Japan or Korea should hop in and talk
about the rampant television show trading that I have heard so much
about there.)
I'll note that many protocols -- good and bad -- spring from
somebody's head. Some of them become successful too. Very
successful. And ietf has no say about them at all. Is this
the new reality?
It is a new reality, not the new reality. We still create lots of
important new things here, and lots of folks still come to us to ask
us to do more. New data formats (or rehashed old data formats) seem
to be happening more outside the IETF, although Atom 1.0 has
certainly garnered its share of publicity. But for layer 7 protocols,
file sharing may be the only major market that has wholly ignored the
IETF.
Sure seems like it to me. Should we be
concerned?
Nope.
Might there be film at 11 at some point because
of it?
Yes, if one that has bad congestion control becomes popular. But,
given the mindshare of BitTorrent these past few years, that seems
pretty unlikely.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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