Subject: RE: net.stewards [Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)]

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 07:09:01 -0700

Brian writes

> Sigh. That's exactly my point; our stewardship role is really 
> limited to advocacy and to providing better altermatives. I 
> don't see where you can find "special pleading", "vast 
> political influence", "force" or "anointed" in what I wrote. 
> I think we would do well to avoid polemic language on this list.

I was replying to the wider debate identified in the original subject
line there. I was not disagreeing with your points. I thought that was
clear.

I disagree with your point about advocacy, I think the IETF can do a bit
more than that.

There is a common assumption that the role of the IETF standards process
is to decide what is used on the net. The idea being that once something
is agreed as a standard it will automatically be implemented and used.
This way of thinking is likely to lead to disappointment.

A much more useful way to think about the IETF (or OASIS or W3C) is that
it is one place where you can meet others to build the necessary support
constituency to achieve deployment.

Most folk get it, a few don't. 

BitTorrent has succeeded (so far) without IETF involvement. There might
well be a point in the future where an IETF group could help further
deployment.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:55:25 -0700

> Behalf Of Michael Thomas
> This is more or less what I had in mind. Correct me if
> I'm wrong, but http 1.0 wasn't the invention of the ietf,
> but sprang forth outside of its purview. Http 1.1 was a 
> response to the many difficulties placed on the net because 
> of http 1.0, and there was an active feedback loop between 
> the http world and the net (ietf) world to adapt both at 
> layer 7 as well as below. Http, after all, was The Big Thing 
> for all parties, so it's not surprising that there was active 
> cross interest.

True enough, the 1.0 draft was mostly developed before it was submitted
to the IETF.

But the differences between 1.0 and 1.1 are hardly save the net stuff.
The only change that has been made that is really significant is the
introduction of the host address header, and that was a unilateral
action by Netscape without any external discussion of any kind. 

The rest of the 1.1 changes are mostly incremental. The chunking
mechanism is an improvement and it makes keep-alive possible but that is
an incremental improvement that was proposed independently of the IETF.

The majority of the WG effort was spent perfecting the cache mechanism
to work with proxies. Only these days we do not use client side proxies
to any real extent - the exception being transparent firewall proxies.
Most Web content is active with very short expiry times.

So yes the WG effort was useful but it certainly did not 'save the
Internet'. Nor was that ever going to be possible, Netscape made it
clear that it would act unilaterally to introduce its own standards from
day one. It was only after they ceased to be the dominant browser that
they discussed proposed changes to their version of the spec before
releasing code.

It is arguable that things could have been improved if we started
earlier. The digest authentication mechanism only exists because of the
IETF attempt to eliminate en-clair transmission of passwords.
Unfortunately very few web sites use it, almost all use the HTML form
field instead.

> What facinates me about p2p is that it was clearly the
> next Big Thing, but there seems to be no feedback loop 
> operating whatsoever. I guess that surprises me. Thomas 
> brought up qos/diffserv and operator business models which is 
> certainly something ietf clue level could assist on, but it 
> seems that we neither know them, nor do they know us and that 
> both sets of people seem satisfied with that. I'm not saying 
> that it's bad -- it's just a very surprising outcome. Ought 
> both sides be that confident that the net as engineered today 
> is what it needs to be for this Big Thing and the Big Thing 
> after that? Or that our fertilization is really the correct 
> mix to prepare the ground for the next Big Thing?

I think the problem you identify here is that the focus of the IAB is
inward, looking at what the IETF is doing. It does not look outward to
look at what the Internet community is doing. It is just assumed that
they are the same thing.

* We did not have a note from the IAB in 2000 saying 'hey this spam
thing that was predicted as a possibility in 1982 is beginning to get
really out of hand and become a criminal nuisance'

* We have not had architectural guidance of the form 'stop pushing BEEP
onto IETF working groups, the Web Services platforms have unanimously
adopted SOAP and the WS-* stack'

* We have not had information of the form 'phishing and social
engineering are becoming major engines for Internet crime'

* We have not had any real analysis of the botnet problem.