[ih] IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)

[Andrew G. Malis]

If we're cataloging IETF successes, in the routing area (other than the
routing protocols themselves) MPLS literally generated multiple billions of
dollars of revenue for equipment vendors selling to service providers, and
many multiple billions of dollars of service provider revenues for
enterprise MPLS-based VPNs and pseudowire services (which they are still
selling to this day).

Cheers,
Andy


On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 12:35 PM Scott Bradner via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> mixed picture of IETF relevance
>
> the world's telephony runs over IETF technology (SIP & RTP) except for
> some pockets of analog phones,
> IETF technology specified by ITU and 3GPP
>
> of the 100s of proposed and full standards, only a few are in significant
> use
>
> IPv6 has had a very slow deployment - most, imo, because it does not offer
> enough difference from IPv4
> and because NATs have reduced the pressure to change - but, according to
> Google, they are getting a lot
> of IPv6 queries (about 45%) ( see
> https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html) - e.g. your iPhone
> runs IPv6 by default
>
> people still show up for IETF meetings (> 1500 paid for Yokohama in March
> - in person & remote)
>
> Scott
>
> > On Aug 10, 2023, at 12:16 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > I've been wondering if the IETF is still effective today.   It's been
> trying for decades to cajole the Internet into adopting IPV6.
> >
> > Instead we now live with a multi-protocol Internet, and the complexity
> and problems that come with it.  In the 90s, the world embraced TCP and got
> rid of all the other protocols.   As I understand it, the IETF now "puts
> new technology on the shelf, where anyone is free to pick it up and use it"
> - quite different from the management process that orchestrated "Flag Day"
> and managed the evolution of the Internet technology in the field.   Some
> people have "picked up" IPV6, but many have not.   I can't tell if I have.
> I also have no idea how I would do it.   Or why I should.
> >
> > Perhaps someone can fill in the history of how the Internet got from
> then to now?  I sent an email on this topic a week or so ago, but it seems
> to have never come out of the elists.isoc.org system.   FYI, here it is,
> in case you didn't get it:
> >
> > --------------------
> >
> > IIRC, the "Flag Day" was one piece of a larger plan.
> >
> > I don't recall the timing of the pieces - it was 40+- years ago. But
> there was also a bureaucratic action in that same era to declare TCP a "DoD
> Standard", and require its presence in DoD procurements - any computer
> system in a DoD purchase using networking had to have TCP. Also, there was
> a program created by NIST (or was it still NBS then?) to provide a test
> suite for conformance to the TCP standard.   So any contractor who wanted
> to sell something to DoD had to have TCP, and by going through the NIST
> test suite they could get a certificate proving that they had TCP
> implemented properly. I don't remember which of these happened in what
> order or how it related to Flag Day (1/1/1983).   But it all seems to me to
> be part of some larger plan to migrate the admittedly small existing
> network to a new standard.
> >
> > At BBN, we went through the NIST process to become a certified testing
> lab, so we could run the tests for anyone who needed it and issue
> conformance certificates.  I'm not sure how many other such labs there
> were.  We also provided consulting services to help people understand TCP
> and figure out why their software didn't pass the tests.   This was never
> seen as any kind of "money maker", but seemed important to do it, since we
> had access to IMPs and such which made it easy to set up a small test lab.
> >
> > I never saw "the plan", but it struck me that there was a lot going on
> behind the scenes to make things like this happen, outside of the research
> or Arpanet community or technology per se, in order to facilitate the
> introduction of TCP to DoD.  Maybe someone else knows more about who was
> involved in all that activity.   Somebody made those things happen...
> >
> > In retrospect, it seems to me that such "soft technology" (conformance
> certification etc.) was complementary to the technical work documented in
> the stream of RFCs, and was important to making TCP "real", and
> establishing a bit of regulation around its use "in the field" with
> mechanisms such as "Flag Day" to enforce a migration from old to new.
> >
> > The Internet is now arguably world class "infrastructure".   But, IMHO,
> it still lacks a lot of the mechanisms that surround other, older,
> infrastructures that move things from point A to point B - e.g., highways,
> electrical service, railroads, airplanes, etc.   The early work on things
> like Flag Day, TCP Conformance Tests, DoD Standardization, and such were
> the beginning of adding a management structure around the Internet
> technology.
> >
> > As near as I can tell, no such effort continues today.   It may have
> faded away back in the 1980s, before TCP became the dominant technology.
>  Perhaps the Internet is just too new for such machinery to be created?
> >
> > Other infrastructures have gone through stages as rules, regulations,
> and practices congeal.  In the early days of electricity it was common for
> accidents to occur, causing fires, deaths, or other disasters.  Electrical
> Codes, safety mechanisms, licensing, rules and practices have made using
> electricity much less dangerous.  The same is true of highways, railroads,
> etc.
> >
> > I've always wondered what happened to that "management framework" that
> started in the 1980s around the Internet infrastructure, and why it hasn't
> resulted in mechanisms today to make the Internet "safer".   I suspect all
> infrastructures need things like electrical codes, UL testing, development
> of fuses, circuit breakers, GFIs, etc., that are used in the electrical
> infrastructure.   But nobody seems to be doing that for the Internet?
> >
> > There's lots of such mechanisms I know about in the US to manage
> infrastructures.  My car occasionally gets a government-mandated recall.
> Airplanes get grounded by FAA.  Train crashes are investigated by the
> Department of Transportation.   Other governments have similar mechanisms
> to manage infrastructure.
> >
> > Has any Internet component, hardware or software, ever been
> recalled...?   "Flag Day" was the last enforcement action I can remember.
> >
> > Jack Haverty
> >
> >
> > --------------------
> >
> > On 8/9/23 18:50, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> >> I had a "tourist" account at the MIT-AI system running ITS, back in the
> >> NCP days.  I used to log in to it over a TIP that had RS232 cables
> >> quietly connecting it to a Telenet node.  I'd dial in to a local Telenet
> >> access point, connect to the cross-connect's node and port, and be
> >> talking to a TIP, where I'd "@o 134" to get to MIT-AI.
> >>
> >> When NCP was turned off on the Flag Day, that stopped working.  At MIT,
> >> as I understand it, they decided not to implement TCP/IP for ITS.  The
> >> workaround for tourists like me was to borrow someone's account at
> >> MIT-OZ, which had TCP support and could also talk to ITS (over
> >> Chaosnet?).  So I'd connect from the TIP using TCP to MIT-OZ, and then
> >> connect to MIT-AI.  It worked OK, though I had to remember when (and how
> >> many times) to double the escape characters.  My access was via a dialup
> >> modem, which was probably the slowest part of the whole system.
> >>
> >> Moving to the present day...
> >>
> >> I continue to see Internet old-timers who long nostalgicly for somebody,
> >> somewhere, to force a "flag day" to shut down IPv4.  The IETF has
> >> unfortunately been captured by these folks, who object to making even
> >> tiny improvements to IPv4 protocols on the grounds that "we shouldn't
> >> make it easier to use IPv4 because that would reduce the urgency of
> >> switching to IPv6".  It is taken for granted in much of IETF that "IPv4
> >> is dead, or it should be" even though it carries far more global daily
> >> traffic, to a far broader range of locations, than IPv6 does.  There was
> >> even a move to "declare IPv4 Historic" which would officially recommend
> >> that nobody use it any more.  That draft RFC was approved in 2017 by the
> >> Sunset4 working group on a vote of three zealots, but it got killed once
> >> saner heads looked at the implications.  For a discussion of that
> >> history, and pointers to the source materials, see section 4 of:
> >>
> >>
> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01.txt
> >>
> >> (The IETF, predictably, declined to support the publication of an RFC
> >> describing this history or succinctly stating that IETF would continue
> >> maintaining IPv4.)
> >>
> >> John
> >>
> >
> > --
> > Internet-history mailing list
> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>