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

[Jack Haverty]

Interesting discussion.  My initial comment, way back in these threads, 
was expressing surprise that the IETF was a "standards body" now, and I 
was curious about the history of how that happened.   I surmised that 
the IETF had become the ISO, but that was just my gut reaction.   I 
remembered the ISO of the early 80s, where we often joked that the ISO 
produced stacks of paper while the Network Project produced piles of 
code, mostly undocumented but working.

If I define a few terms...  IETF is the IETF as we now it now.   NP is 
the "Network Project", which started out as the Arpanet with NWG and 
evolved into the IETF over time.

In the early 80s, it seems that a transition started from the NP to the 
IETF.  NP was a research-oriented environment, where prototypes were 
created to test out ideas and sometimes scientific theories. It 
necessarily involved tight collaboration among the thinkers and the 
doers - rough consensus and running code.  The code was freely available 
and shared, largely thanks to the FTP capabilities of the Arpanet.

Today, if I understand the comments in these threads, the IETF produces 
standards - documents.   The documents may come from a variety of 
sources, some internal to the IETF but most external. Some "running 
code" may have been produced, but it's not always publicly available (at 
least I don't know where to find it...).

So, for history's sake, ... how did the NP evolve into today's IETF, and 
what happened to the NP activities that didn't survive the transition?

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Now I'm just a lowly User, but imagine you're the CEO of a large 
corporation, or perhaps of a government, and you want to build a modern 
facility for your employees, or customers, or residents, or visitors, to 
interact using all the devices they all carry around. Perhaps electronic 
mail, websites providing useful information and services, maybe even a 
video conferencing capability?

You can issue RFPs, but how do you know what acronyms are important to 
require?   TCPIPV6, DKIM, HTTP, QUIC, SMTP, MIME, ...?  There are 
hundreds or perhaps thousands to choose from.  Which ones will be needed 
for a reliable, secure, infrastructure quality service? When you get 
proposals, how do you verify that the vendor has correctly implemented 
the required alphabet soup?

Now imagine you're just a developer, who's supposed to write code to 
implement some alphabet soup.  You can probably find the specifications 
somewhere in the IETF website, and you can write the code using that.   
How do you test your code to see that it actually works with others 
you'll encounter when it is on the 'net?   Is there some independent 
"certification" authority that will test your code and confirm that it 
has been properly implemented?

All of these mechanisms existed in the days of the NP, especially around 
the time that TCP/IPV4 was declared a DoD Standard.   (I never thought 
of the US Department of Defense as a "standards body" until just now!  
But it was.)

It's still not clear, to me, where we are today, and the larger picture 
that shows the IETF's role and relationships with things like W3C and 
others.   But wherever we are today, how did we get from there (NP days) 
to here?

Jack