On 10/11/12 7:00 PM, Jorge Contreras wrote:
7) What should be considered when evaluating the composition of design
teams to avoid antitrust concerns?
Technical expertise, balance of interests (per the discussion in the join
IEEE/IAB/IETF document that was recently released), and no dominance by
any particular company.
Indeed, I'd expect chairs to follow the above advice even if it didn't
affect antitrust concerns. In fact, I'd say following the rest of our
process appropriately *requires* that you follow the above advice.
That's why I think it's unnecessary to say this in the antitrust FAQ: If
chairs don't know that they need to have appropriate representation of
technical expertise and viewpoints on a design team, we need to fix that
at a higher level.
8) What responsibilities do chairs have in avoiding antitrust concerns
within their WGs.
Without a formal Antitrust policy, I don't think there are any official
responsibilities. However, the prudent chair will try to dissuade
anticompetitive conduct in his/her WG, and will report suspected
anticompetitive activity to the IESG.
Again, most anti-competitive behavior is also going to be a violation of
other IETF procedures: In Jorge's example above, if folks from a group
of old guard companies try to push the technology of an up-and-coming
competitor out of a WG because they'd prefer to stick with their current
technology and the chair allows the technology to be pushed out even
though the new guy has some small amount of support and has answered all
of the technical objections of the old fogies, that's not a proper
consensus call. "There's 20 of us and only 2 of them" does not mean that
there's rough consensus if the 2 have strong technical arguments for
going in a different direction that go unanswered by the larger group.
One of the reasons that some of us wanted simply an FAQ and not a new
antitrust policy is because sticking tightly to proper IETF procedures
will almost always avoid a chair getting themselves into antitrust hot
water.
pr
--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478