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Stepping back a bit Re: Internet Society joins Liberty Alliance Management Board: Why?

2009-03-03 18:40:52

As Lynn mentioned in her message, ISOC has been building up more technical programmes over the course of the last couple of years. I want to take the opportunity to say a bit more about that, as an indirect way of addressing the issue of what types of decisions are being made, and what the intended implications are.

First, ISOC is dedicated to keeping the Internet development model open and functioning, and it is dedicated to supporting the IETF.

A couple of things that this means in practice are that ISOC develops messaging for the non-IETF, not-always-technical communities pointing out the strengths and virtues of the Internet's open development model, and the appropriate venues for carrying out policy and technical discussions. And then we go out and work with different groups, in various ways, to get that message across. You can see some examples of that in our contributions to the ITU-T World Telecomms Standards Assembly meeting in Johannesburg last year -- fact sheets on Internet standards (pointing to the IETF), IPv6 policy (pointing to the RIRs for regional policy discussions), etc.

http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/governance/itu-wtsa_2008.shtml
http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/ISOC-WTSA_20081017.pdf
http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/ISOC-ITU-ipv6_20081017.pdf

We're also doing work to raise awareness about critical issues facing the Internet. As an example, I don't want to discuss an unannounced product ( ;-) ), but we're planning an IPv6 briefing (targeted not at us engineers, but rather at the deploying world) in conjunction with IETF74.

These are things ISOC does to further its own mission of promoting the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world, and not because it is the organizational home of the IETF.

When we participate in IETF work, we (like everyone else) participate as individuals, and we work quite hard, internally, to make sure we don't presume a special role with the IETF in deciding its course.

And, if people want to know more about what we're up to, I'm always happy to come talk about it.

So, coming back to the issue at hand -- while it is unfortunate if ISOC winds up surprising the IETF leadership with its decisions, rather than being a decision made in ignorance of the state of technical discussions in the identity community, I believe that it was a decision made in consideration of the broader world of influences on open Internet development than are typically discussed within the IETF or any of the identity-specific development groups.

ISOC joined Liberty to have a voice in shaping the new organization to ensure that it is open, transparent, and not subject to capture by the interests of a single technology or community: consistent with the Internet development model. In the long run, we hope that various open efforts will gain a great deal by bringing their ideas and concerns into this process as it means that their work will get out to audiences along with the messages coming from large companies, technology partisans, etc.

From our perspective, the time has come to move identity efforts to wider deployment, and they need to find a way to communicate both the importance of the solutions they offer and the ways that users can best manage both their own identity and the slew of new relationships that these technologies will enable. I know Lucy is always looking for input -- providing some concrete input on how best to achieve this would certainly be considered helpful to ISOC.

And none of this should particularly challenge the IETF or any identity work it chooses to take on or not; you'll have seen at least two of us individuals raising our hands in support of the OAUTH work in the last BoF.

Thanks,
Leslie.

===========
Leslie Daigle
Chief Internet Technology Officer, ISOC
daigle(_at_)isoc(_dot_)org


Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote:
My concern regarding this announcement is the fact that it gives support to a 
misguided effort by Liberty Alliance. I think it is somewhat irresponsible for 
the ISOC to actively support an effort without first engaging the community at 
large to fully understand the dynamics of the identity communities involved.

The people behind the IDtbd effort have been going around trying to sell this 
effort for a while. The reality is that at this point, the communities behind 
two of the most successful identity related protocols, OAuth and OpenID, have 
rejected this effort by Liberty, including many of the individual companies 
that support these communities.

I find it personally offensive that Liberty have been going behind the OAuth's 
community's back trying get corporations to move their OAuth and OpenID efforts 
to IDtbd instead of the communities that drive these efforts forward.

IDtbd is an effort to create a full-blown standard body to manage all identity 
related protocols, with its own set of IPR rules, process, and governance. They 
seek to nullify existing communities by positioning themselves as the authority 
in the space. Supporting this effort directly contradicts the current IETF 
effort to form an OAuth working group.

EHL



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