Today, the IETF Turns 25

FranckMartin writes "Little known to the general public, the Internet Engineering Task Force celebrates its 25th birthday on the 16th of January. DNSSEC, IDN, SIP, IPv6, HTTP, MPLS ... all acronyms that were codified at the IETF. But little known, one can argue the IETF does not exist; it just happens that people meet 3 times a year in some hotel around the world and are on mailing lists in between. The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run, as well as the way the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been open to the civil society."

Comments

ICANT

[girlintraining]

The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run,

Yes, I believe for the ICANN people, it served as a giant lighthouse warning petty tyrants of the dangers of open, collaborative design processes. Since ICANN took office, domain name registration has become horribly convoluted, the prices have gone up, lawsuits abound, and we're now in danger of running out of real estate (IPv4 addresses), while they sit on their arse and worry about copyright. They're like a HOA -- they're fining people left and right and ordering them to take down christmas decorations, flags, and people who dare to paint their house in an unapproved color, while they forget to spend money on things like garbage collection, road repair, and snow removal.

No, actually, they ARE the internet's HOA, and about as bloody useful.

Re:IETF doesn't exist

[Tacvek]

The IETF exists in the same way that Debian Project exists, as an unregistered association of individuals, who operate under specific rules created by consensus. However, not being a legal entity in and of themselves, they each have umbrella organizations, namely Software in the Public Interest and the Internet Society, respectively. Both umbrella organizations encompass multiple other proects in addition to Debian and IETF.

The only notable difference is that while the Debian Project has clearly defined members (the Debian Developers), the IETF does not. On the other hand Debian relies heavily on individuals who are not members, making even this distinction smaller than it may seem.

Re:IETF doesn't exist

[mbone]

The IETF does not legally exist, and has no members (legal or otherwise). The IETF Trust does legally exit, to hold IETF copyrights and trademarks, and ISOC (a 501(3)c charity) serves to support the IETF, although there is nothing legally binding the IETF to ISOC (nor could there be, as non-existant entities cannot enter into binding contracts).

Re:ICANN is open?

[Tacvek]

You should not have any problem with the IETF. They do virtually everything in the public. You may read the mailing lists, and contribute.

The standards created by the IETF are generally completely open by every definition, in that any part may participate in development, there is no restrictions of any kind on access to the standards text[1], and most do not require any patent licensing[2].

The IETF has also been generally fairly competent. They did screw up a bit with IPv6[3], but otherwise many of the standards have been widely deployed with little or no issue, which is about all a standards body can ask for.

ICANN on the other hand has real issues. They are largely a policy organization, with the technical aspects restricted to the part known as the IANA. ICANN's IANA implementation leaves no complaints, but it does extremely poorly with setting policy. It does not help that it gets money from the US Government, which remains under the delusion that it is in charge of the internet. Personally I would kill off ICANN, having the IANA move under the umbrella of the ISOC, and have the IANA begin publishing the root zone directly, rather than involve Verisign and the US Government. Of course that would mean replacing the DNSSec key and procedures but that can be done.

Then we need to replace the policy aspect of ICANN, which is trickier. Policy should not be dictated by what would make the most money for the Registries and Registrars, assuming that the new policy would even keep that broken system. Better would be to require all Registries to be Non-profit organizations, which also operate as the sole registrar for said Registry. The exception would be the CC-TLDs, which would be run however the country in question desires.

Of course, the key here would be to convince the root server operators to go along with the coup, since ICANN would never relinquish control. Another tricky part would be for the new Registries to get the information needed to run (what domains are owned, and by who) from the existing for-profit registries.

Footnotes:

[1] One notable restriction it does not have is any fee to obtain a copy.
[2] Although the standards are unfortunately permitted to be developed to require known patents that will require a license with either upfront costs or royalties.
[3] They screwed up by not initially specifying some mechanism for IPv6 only clients to talk to IPv4 only hosts. This has resulted in multiple proposed mechanisms for doing just that, which are incompatible, and will cause some headache before we just go with one. They all include some sort of Network Protocol Translation (which obviously includes translating network addresses) being done by some ISP server or router. A few abuse other systems like DNS to do this, while the better ones merely encode IPv4 addresses in IPv6 addresses and use anycast to route them to the ISP servers/routers performing Network Protocol Translation.

They also screwed up by not taking the opportunity to fix anycast to make it support TCP connections. Anycast addresses are permitted as destination addresses, but source addressed must be unique to the device in question, so the TCP SYN/ACK packet would include the unique address of the server. If it were mandated that the TCP stack read this address and use it as the destionation IP for all remaining packets in this connection, then TCP would simply just work over IPv6 Anycast.

Re:IETF doesn't exist

[Tacvek]

Which is very similar to the Debian Project, since it also does not legally exist. While it does have membership as I pointed out, it does not really mean that much since it is highly reliant on non-members. (The IETF is obviously entirely reliant on non-members since it has no members).

SPI (Software in the Public Interest) serves both roles (to hold the trademarks and other resources including funds, as well as to provide support) for Debian, which likewise has no binding legal ties to SPI, and could not have such ties for the very same reason.

Thus I'm quite sure we are both saying the same thing, you saying it directly, and me by analogy to another non-(legal-entity) that some people may be more familiar with than the IETF.