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

[Dave Crocker]

On 8/28/2023 7:45 PM, Michael Thomas via Internet-history wrote:
> You were not part of the "private cabal". I was the one who decided 
> that DNSSec wasn't worth fighting about. I was wrong as it turns out. 
> DNSSec deployment has been a disaster. DK got that completely wrong. I 
> hosted the meeting where the two drafts were merged at my house in San 
> Francisco. You weren't there.

sigh.

Mark Delany, at Yahoo, solicited continuing 'community' comments from me 
and Eric Allman, early in the development of DomainKeys. It became 
highly collaborative.  And this was long before there was any 
interaction with the IETF.  I'd guess a year.

I've no idea how the timelines compared.  DomainKeys was quickly quite 
visible.  I didn't know of IIM until much later, as DK was getting ready 
to move to the IETF, as I recall.

I do know that the cabal I'm referring to had a substantial number of 
companies involved, and an extended series of meetings, over roughly a 
year, and at a variety venues.  Yours might have been one of them.  For 
the most part, the cabal's dynamic was quite collaborative among the 
range of participants.  There was an exception, of course.

I also have no idea what your reference to DNSSec and Domainkeys is 
about, since DK didn't involve DNSSec.

As for minor vs. major influences, I'll note that:

4870 <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4870> 	*Domain-Based Email 
Authentication Using Public Keys Advertised in the DNS (DomainKeys)* M. 
Delany [ May 2007 ] (TXT, HTML) (Obsoleted-By RFC4871 
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4871>) (Status: HISTORIC) (Stream: 
IETF, WG: NON WORKING GROUP) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC4870)
4871 <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4871> 	*DomainKeys Identified 
Mail (DKIM) Signatures* E. Allman, J. Callas, M. Delany, M. Libbey, J. 
Fenton, M. Thomas [ May 2007 ] (TXT, HTML) (Obsoletes RFC4870 
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4870>) (Obsoleted-By RFC6376 
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6376>) (Updated-By RFC5672 
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5672>) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) 
(Stream: IETF, Area: art, WG: dkim) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC4871)

permits easy comparison between the original Yahoo work and DKIM.  
Perhaps significantly, IIM was not published as an RFC.

As part of the process to resolve some essential issues, during the DKIM 
effort, at one point I did a functional matrix to compare the two source 
specifications.  One was quite pragmatic, aesthetically ugly, and very 
badly written.  The other was very well written, prettier in design, but 
had adoption challenges, such as requiringd creation of a new global 
database. Developing the comparison analysis was educational.

As for who was present for what, my recollection is that there were a 
number of us present at pretty much all of the activity, across the arc 
from Yahoo's effort to DKIM's initial and revised publications.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social