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

[Bob Purvy]

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.

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.

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 1:10 PM John Day via Internet-history <
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> 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
> > 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
> > --
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