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

[Michael Thomas]

On 8/30/23 4:45 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> 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...
>
As much as I have a love hate relationship with IETF g*d help us if it 
were an actual SDO like ITU. People joke about ipv6's lack of 
deployment, but I'm not sure we'd even have something approximating TCP 
if it were a stuffy SDO driving it. From the outside, I nearly came up 
to ISI for an IETF meeting in the late 80's. The only investment on my 
part for my company would have been the gas I used coming up from Orange 
County. If it were the ITU or something like that it would never even 
have occurred to me that that's something I could consider. Closed 
bodies like W3C are the wrong model.

Mike