[governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes

[Karl Auerbach]

On 01/25/2012 01:11 AM, McTim wrote:
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/25/who-really-stopped-sopa-and-why/

> The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open.  The best ideas
> win through vigorous debate and testing.

As a person who runs a company that does protocol testing I can attest
that the notion of testing protocols is a notion that has withered and
left us with many code bases that are... let's be euphemistic and say
that they are not industrial strength.

Those who have spent decades in the IETF know that the notion of
technical meritocracy has sometimes been a facade.

One of the most overt instances of politics over technology occurred
back in the mid 1980's when there were three different network
management protocols on the table.  One (HEMS) was elegant, but not
deeply implemented.  Another (SGMP/SNMP) was ugly and weak but had some
implementations.  The last was CMIP from ISO/OSI.

For political reasons HEMS was sent to die. CMIP was retained as a sop
to the then growing GOSIP, MAP, TOP bandwagon for ISO/OSI.

More recently, but still in the network management path, the NETCONF
protocol has had to wear the intentionally deceiving dressing of a
"configuration" protocol even though everyone admits that it is a dandy
network "management" protocol.

I know from personal experience that when we standardized (in
RFC1001/1002) what eventually became the CIFS protocol (used by
Microsoft systems today) that because of pressure from the higher layers
of the IETF we had to throw out a very elegant design and replace it
with a much less elegant and scalable design based on DNS.  (I remember
Paul Mockepetris once standing on a table, glowering, pointing down at
me, and in a deep and strong voice declaring that because of those RFCs
that I "have destroyed DNS".)

And we can go back to the beginning of IPv6 - there were several
competing proposals on the table.  One that had particularly strong
technical merits was TUBA - it was essentially the ISO/OSI
connection-less network layer protocol with an address space much larger
than IPv6 and many other very nice aspects - such as a decent checksum
algorithm.  But it was ISO/OSI and even today much of that technology,
no matter how well conceived, is still anathema.

For instance, in IPv4/v6 there is "mobile IP" - which is really a very
strange kind of triangular routing with all kinds of performance and
security issues.  ISO/OSI had a different method for this - it used a
thing called a "session" layer that makes unnecessary all of the
juggling we see in mobile IP.

We still see the relics of the IP versus ISO/OSI wars - one of these
relics affects internet governance directly in the form of a kind of
robot-like automatic rejection of anything associated with the ITU
(which was one of the engines behind ISO/OSI.)

None of this is to say that the IETF and internet ignore technical
merit.  But to say that the IETF's output is not affected by political
forces would be to say something that is not fully accurate.

Back around 1990 the IETF faced a decision - was it to be a technical
body or become a standards body.  It chose the latter.  And I think that
many people who participated both before and after that date feel that
that change marked a distinct reduction in the innovative quality of the
work being done.

(It does not help either that the management of many tech companies
measures aspiring engineers by counting how many "Internet Drafts" and
RFCs bear their names.)

In general internet governance ought not to try to emulate the IETF.

The IETF is a relatively objective technical world, a world in which
goals and backgrounds of the participants are roughly aligned - and in
which merit of solutions is, over time, somewhat measurable.

In nearly every regard the world of internet governance is different -
issues are more subjective, the goals of participants are often in
complete opposition, and measures of merit are hard to come by.

(BTW - for those of us interested in internet history, I think that the
last TCP/IP "backoff" occurred in 1990 when we all met for a week in
North Andover, Mass. at FTP Software and broke one another's software.
And the replacement, the Interop show network because less a proving
ground a more of a marketing network somewhere in the latter 1990's)

	--karl--

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