[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

Wed Apr 29 16:43:45 PDT 2026

There is a lot you are missing.

> On Apr 29, 2026, at 16:33, Bob Purvy <bpurvy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> You are mistaking "process" as "results." Having all the "stakeholders" present and following some kind of "democratic" process does absolutely nothing to create a successful result. What it does is what Dave Crocker said: taking the union of everyone's wishes, so that the end result is garbage.

I pointed that out the success of the Internet was independent of the IETF process that is quite clear. When presented with potential solutions, the IETF was either directed to take a direction (usually a step backwards), or chose the more conservative decision (also a step backwards) and flawed direction. The Internet is a testament to how much you can get wrong and stilll have something that works. (Sounds a bit like DOS, doesn’t it?) ;-)

> 
> Science doesn't operate as a democracy, corporations don't, and neither did the IETF. If science worked like the CCITT, we'd still be thinking spicy food causes stomach ulcers.

Whoopee do! Where in my post did I point at the CCITT as a glowing example of standards? It was clear in 1974 that they were clueless and a deadend. As I said, why would anyone wasted time on CCITT? 

Standards is not science. Never has been, can’t be. The broad participation of a standards committee whether open or not, guarantees a conservative result. The very nature of any standards process is to yield a conservative result.  If anything, standards are sometimes made to codify commonly accepted results of science. However, sometimes standards are created based on flawed science or perhaps more correctly flawed engineering. Sometimes a corporation tries to make their ‘product’ a standard, usually especially these days to little effect. In the early days of the IETF, the excitement carried over from the NWG created the illusion of innovation, but the 80s brought a halt to it, and as we have seen on this list people began to realize it within the last decade,
> 
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 1:10 PM John Day via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>> Those must be some papers! I will have to check them out. They will rely on your years of experience in the IETF and all of the many ISO OSI meetings you attended! There is nothing like first-hand experience.
>> 
>> > On Apr 29, 2026, at 12:25, Dave Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > On 4/29/2026 6:13 AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote:
>> >> Andrew Russell's argument in _Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks_ (Cambridge UP, 2014) casts this cultural difference in another light: that the OSI approach embodied (or, and I think this is my gloss, "was hobbled by") old-fashioned governance models that were in an important sense more open than the ARPANET/Internet work that led to TCP/IP.  For, he argues, the Internet innovators had to satisfy only one customer: the US Defense Department (or, depending on exactly when, [D]ARPA).  By constrast, the OSI work as well as work that happened before that were international efforts that involved many different parties, sometimes with competing interests, and that used the mechanisms of co-operation used in other places in societies too (like voting etc.) to make decisions.  In this account, the problem OSI and other such efforts faced is basically that they could not move as fast as those who needed only to satisfy a single "customer" of the work.
>> 
>> Both Andrews pretty well describe the differences in the two groups. One based on a more authoritarian model and one on a more open representative model.
>> 
>> I remember standing around at more than IETF meeting chuckling about how closely the IETF resembled a democratic Communist Party.  An IETF meeting was a Party Congress, where standards were developed but large companies were free to stack meetings or just be able to hum loudly, their output went to an elite selection of stakeholders that corresponded to a Politburo (IESG). Some even suggested people of who were filling the roles of Stalin, Beria, Trotsky, etc. it was pretty funny. Nothing serious. When I remarked about it someone deeply involved, their remark was, ‘O, yea, it is definitely organized to be run by an inner circle elite.’ Surprising.
>> 
>> Andrew Sullivan’s characteristic of the ISO process is also dead on, '"was hobbled by" old-fashioned governance models. Itdefinitely was. Models that had been around for over 250 years: Representative Democracy.  Which we all know from Madison’s Federalist 10 are supposed to be slow and deliberative on purpose,  Remember ISO standardizes a huge variety of topics: screw threads, paper size, nuclear reactors, traffic signs, computing and thousands of others. ISO standards arte voluntary.  National bodies accredit committees to work on specific topic areas. 
>> 
>> The National Groups develop proposals for standards and comments and modifications to other National Body proposals. These groups consist of national corporations and organizations with an interest in the topic. The only requirement for membership in the US was ’show up at a meeting!”  Beyond that there was a requirement to be at the last 2 of 3 meetings so one had some idea what was going on. ;-) Same held for International meetings. People going to international meetings needed to understand the concerns of their colleagues and you didn’t want people getting interested just because the meeting was in a nice place. There was work to do. Meetings generally lasted from 9am and often late into the night. If not meeting, then writing assignments. Meetings have been known to last until 4am and reconvene at 8:30 the next morning. I learned why a two hour lunch was necessary: 20 minutes to grab something and an hour and half to confer with others and try to find consensus.  The rumors of lots of fine dinners were rare and probably no more often more likely less than at IETF meetings from what I have seen.
>> 
>> Since a WG can be small, not all stakeholders may be represented at this low level. At International Working Group (WG) meetings on specific topics, (can range from 5 or 6 to over 100) all of that is discussed and debated and a consensus is formed. The attendees to an international meeting are not there to represent themselves but have been entrusted to represent their members who could not attend. (National Body delegations much larger than delegations are frowned on in the interests of collegial  idiscussion.) Votes are generally unanimous and great lengths are gone to accommodate comments. Once a WG is satisfied with its work, it is forwarded to Study Committee (SC). The SC oversees the work of several WGs working on related aspects of a larger topic. Consequently, its membership is broader but still supposedly experts in this topic. They too do not represent themselves but the members of their corresponding National SC. Their purpose is to coordinate the work of their WGs and ensure consistency and catch errors that the WG missed. Potentially, all National Body stakeholders with an interest in the topic are represented by technical experts at the SC level. A proposed standard is reviewed by the SC area level experts and comments are submitted to be resolved by an editing committee (often with a lot of discussion). Eventually a consensus is reached and a Draft International Standard is proposed to the SC’s parent Technical Committee (TC). (Two levels of deliberation analogous to the House and Senate). The TC consists of all stakeholders for the broader level of the topic, experts concerned with the longer view, and perhaps a more managerial view of the role of the standard. Any last minute comments are accommodated, the Standard is voted on, and an International Standard is created. You can really see how the ISO process is structured to follow a Representative Democracy. Not surprising in that ISO was recreated in the post-WWII environment.
>> 
>> I am sure David went into much more detail about how this whole process works in his articles. As you can see, it is a long deliberative process to ensure the widest input by all stakeholders at every level in the approval process.
>> 
>> It is true that approval is by National Body balloting rather than humming or a meeting room indicating approval. This will seem strange for the IETF, but it can be advantageous, when there are big players to deal with. In the OSI work, if the PTTs weren’t proposing something dumb with many PTTs supporting it, it was IBM trying to stonewall the process. More than one once, I was able to use the voting to work around them and keep the work moving or even getting work started that they had been stonewalling for years.
>> 
>> I would like to be able to say that one is better than the other, but technically I can’t. Both are quite inferior.  But if you think about it, the purpose of Federalist 10 is slow deliberate process. The IETF likes to point to its success, which it has had. But that success is based on a long string of technical mistakes (better solutions were known at the time), it tended to act conservatively compensated by lots of money, and Moore’s Law. As Karl indicated earlier there were good ideas in OSI but well hidden and lots of bad ideas from the PTTs (the cost of consensus). OSI was really a constant battle between oil and water direction and no real synthesis possible. As I said, it was doomed once it was decided to collaborate with CCITT. But with no deregulation even on the horizon, it is not clear Europe had any other choice. The ISO faction was trying to do more what the IETF was doing but to move ahead from where we had gotten to. The PTTs were trying to drag telecom back into the Dark Ages.
>> 
>> Karl, why would you go to ITU meetings!!?? They were clearly authoritarian and had nothing but bad ideas.
>> 
>> I should read this over, but I am not going to. Sorry for any write-os I missed.
>> 
>> Take care,
>> John
>> 
>> 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > For the Lynch/Rose book, I did a chapter on the standards process and included a superficial comparison with the OSI processes:
>> > 
>> >   *Evolving the system*. In Internet System Handbook, D. Lynch, and M.
>> >   Rose, eds. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. 1993
>> >   https://archive.org/details/internetsystemha00erne
>> > 
>> > I did a version of this for ACM Standardsview:
>> > 
>> >   *Making Standards the IETF Way*
>> >   https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/174683.174689
>> > 
>> > Pete Resnick did an RFC that included a point about the IETF I consider fundamental and significantly underappreciated:
>> > 
>> >   *On Consensus and Humming in the IETF*
>> >   https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7282.html
>> > 
>> > 
>> > Russel's focus 'governance model' is helpful, but it it is worth distinguishing between at least two venues for this.  Also, I think he got a critical point wrong, albeit for an understandable reason.
>> > 
>> > * Governance applies to the standards process itself, but also to the
>> >   operational model.
>> > * Having centralized funding does not automatically mean centralized
>> >   decision-making
>> > 
>> > 
>> > *Operational Model*
>> > 
>> >   The original Arpanet/Internet model had a centralized backbone, with
>> >   highly independent users (enterprises/hosts).  Some ad hoc Internet
>> >   backbones emerged in the early 1980s, but NSFNet solidified the
>> >   requirement to permit multiple, independent backbones and finally
>> >   produced a routing protocol to support this.
>> > 
>> >   By contrast the OSI world was dominated by a model of tightly
>> >   controlled, monopolistic carriers providing backbone services. On
>> >   the surface, this might be thought to be similar to the Internet
>> >   model that developed, but the relationship among monopoly carriers
>> >   was/is profoundly different from the very loose 'co-opetition' model
>> >   prevalent in the Internet, including for backbone services.
>> > 
>> >   Note that X.400 addresses required specifying the email backbone
>> >   carrier.  This led to bizarre business cards that might contain a
>> >   number of (very long) separate X.400 addresses, differing only by
>> >   that one attribute field.
>> > 
>> >   *
>> >   *
>> > 
>> > *Standards Process*
>> > 
>> >   While it's true the original Arpanet and Internet work derived from
>> >   central funding and oversight -- and the oversight did, sometimes,
>> >   get asserted at important decision junctures -- the daily reality
>> >   for making decisions involved gaining agreement among a collection
>> >   of highly independent participants. (I see that Steve has made a
>> >   similar point.)
>> > 
>> >       It is worth having a thoughtful discussion to consider whether
>> >       the historical participation and decision model still, fully
>> >       applies in the IETF, but of course, that's not a history topic...
>> > 
>> >   The OSI world's model for decision-making is unanimity.  The
>> >   Internet's is 'rough consensus', which translates to 'strongly
>> >   dominant agreement'.  Leaving room for routing around minority
>> >   dissent has a profound effect on the the ability to make forward
>> >   progress. However, this has not meant ignoring minority concerns,
>> >   which is nicely discussed in Resnick's RFC. (However it also seems
>> >   to be far less applicable now.)
>> > 
>> >   The Internet approach was aided by an additional, major difference: 
>> >   urgency.  The early Arpanet/Internet work was dominated by a desire
>> >   to have something fielded quickly. Yesterday would have been ideal. 
>> >   By contrast, the OSI world generally had a very casual approach to
>> >   schedule, measured in years rather than months.  (Alas, this is now
>> >   true for most Internet work, too.)
>> > 
>> >   The Internet's reliance on email venues for work, with physical
>> >   meetings primarily used to focus on essential points of difficulty,
>> >   permitted steady, incremental progress.  For the OSI world, all work
>> >   took place at occasional, long, face-to-face meetings. 
>> >   Surprisingly, for the Fax-over-email work, I witnessed the latter
>> >   try to spontaneously make major design changes, literally overnight,
>> >   intending to make a final decision the next day.
>> > 
>> >   It is also significant that the Internet specifications documents
>> >   were openly available, all through the development process and
>> >   beyond. The OSI documents were paywalled.  Added to this was that
>> >   participation in the Internet processes tended to be relatively open
>> >   -- and from around 1987 completely open -- whereas OSI participation
>> >   was tightly constrained.  This meant the Internet work got much more
>> >   community review than the OSI work did.  (A common experience for
>> >   folk involved in the early Internet work, when traveling around the
>> >   world, was to come across random technical folk who had read the
>> >   RFCs.  Mine in 1997 was on the northern end of Borneo...)
>> > 
>> >   Lastly, the IETF world has tended to develop proof-of-concept
>> >   prototypes, as specifications are developed, and sometimes has even
>> >   mandated this.  My understanding is that the OSI world did not.
>> > 
>> >   I've characterized the resulting difference between these two
>> >   processes as:  The OSI world took the union of everyone's wish list;
>> >   the Internet world took the intersection.  The former tended to be
>> >   lean and pragmatic.  The latter tended to be large, cumbersome and
>> >   operationally challenging.
>> > 
>> > d/
>> > 
>> > -- 
>> > Dave Crocker
>> > 
>> > dhc at dcrocker.net <mailto:dhc at dcrocker.net>
>> > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
>> > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>> > +1.408.329.0791
>> > 
>> > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
>> > Northern California Coastal Region
>> > Information & Planning Coordinator
>> > American Red Cross
>> > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org <mailto:dave.crocker2 at redcross.org>
>> > -- 
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