[governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes

[Ian Peter]

Backing up Karl's point - as someone involved in anti spam IETF efforts, I
can assure you that it was  pragmatic politics (the need to involve
Microsoft) rather than merit or best solutions, than dominated IETF efforts.
The result is evident.

Nothing wrong with that - but that the suggestion that IETF operates purely
on technical grounds with no other considerations, is nonsense.




> From: Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com>
> Reply-To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:48:50 -0800
> To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
> Subject: Re: [governance] another interesting IG piece in Forbes
> 
> On 01/25/2012 01:11 AM, McTim wrote:
>> http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/25/who-really-stopped-sopa-an
>> d-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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