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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 31-Aug-23 07:40, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.   

Put it this way: at a generic standards meeting at the OECD in Paris
in about 1996, I (as IAB Chair) explained that we were a group of
individuals producing documents by rough consensus, but we weren't
a formal SDO. I was told (by someone pretty senior from IEEE, I think)
that I was being a bit disingenuous. I certainly realised then that
the world had changed. Walks like an SDO, talks like an SDO...

It was Vint who arranged formal liaison with ISO, via ISOC, and
that might actually have been kilometre zero for the IETF as an SDO.

    Brian

> 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?
> 
> --------------
> 
> 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
>