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RE: draft-ietf-v6ops-natpt-to-historic-00.txt

2007-07-02 10:45:44
This is a very important point.

If you want to do policy then you have to do accountability. The IETF 
organization structures are not designed to support policy work. They might 
even be designed to stop people from trying to do policy work.

For an organization to do policy work it has to have mechanisms for 
accountability and representation of the key interests. That is not compatible 
with an organization which has no members, rejects voting and who selects the 
nomination committee by lottery.
 
What seems to be irritating some people here is a perceived unilateral decision 
'hey we don't like NAT so lets go trash the NAT-PT docs'. That might be the 
right call but I do not get any sense from the draft that the authors seriously 
considered the reasons why people are deploying NAT today as being valid.


That may or may not be the right thing to do here. But we seem to have a 
constitution that only allows negative policy statements to come out. The 
Internet is not asking the IETF for guidance on what not to do. What people 
want is a positive architectural vision that they can plan to.

This is the type of work product I would like to see the IAB deliver. 

But in order to make such statements stick there would have to be a lot more 
outreach built into the process than there is today.


At the moment we have three Internet standards organizations that are dimly 
aware of the existence of each other and no more. And none of those 
organizations has a real interaction with organizations like AntiPhishing 
Working Group, MAAWG, ASC etc.


We have three grand challenges for the next generation internet: security, cost 
of administration and IPv6. 

In order to drive change across the Internet we need to have contact between 
some of these groups. How about holding meetings between the IETF IAB, OASIS 
Architecture board, W3C TAG and representatives from groups like MAAWG, ASC, 
APWG etc?

I would like to see statements from the IAB of the form 'we have talked to 
representatives of ISPs and in their view this IPv6 thing is not going to 
happen unless A, B and C happen first'. 


-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Huitema 
[mailto:huitema(_at_)windows(_dot_)microsoft(_dot_)com] 
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 12:44 PM
To: Noel Chiappa; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: draft-ietf-v6ops-natpt-to-historic-00.txt

From: Noel Chiappa, Monday, July 02, 2007 6:08 AM

    > From: itojun(_at_)itojun(_dot_)org (Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino)

    > if NAT-PT is to be made historic due to the claims 
presented in 
the
    > draft, all of the NAT related documents have to be 
made historic
    > ...
    > and all of the NAT traversal documents .. has to be banned at 
once.

    > itojun(_at_)fahrenheit 911

The irony of that email address, appended to that message, 
is pretty 
good.

    Noel

:-)

Maybe someone should pause and consider why the IETF 
publishes specifications, or informational documents. Over 
the last 15 years, I have seen a drift of attitude, basically 
from engineering to a policy making. 

In the old engineering attitude, working groups were created 
because several like-minded engineers wanted to develop some 
function, or protocol. It was important for them to get 
together, so they could voluntarily agree on the details. If 
they did not, each would develop their own version, and there 
will be no interoperability. The result was documented in a 
set of RFC, so that whoever wanted to develop a compatible 
product could. IANA registries are used to ensure that when 
options arise, the options are numbered in an orderly manner. 

In the policy making attitude, working groups are created to 
control evolution of a particular function. The working group 
members are concerned that someone else might be implementing 
something harmful to the Internet. Their goal is not so much 
to develop products as to ensure that non-conforming products 
do not get developed. IANA registries are used to control 
extensibility of the resulting protocols, to make sure that 
"bad" options never get a number.

In short, the IETF evolved from an informal gathering where 
engineers will agree on how to do things, to a reactive body 
that mostly aims at controlling evolution of the Internet. Is 
that really what we want?

-- Christian Huitema




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