[ih] This Review is for Everyone

[Greg Skinner]

On Mar 11, 2026, at 11:58 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> If anyone is in the least interested, I have posted a rather personal review of TimBL's recent book:
> 
> https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/timbl-crits.html
> 
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>   Brian Carpenter
> 

From the review:

p.94 describes the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a "non-profit". This is imprecise. The IETF itself isn't incorporated in any way and has no formal membership model. It's loosely associated with the Internet Society, which is a non-profit under US law. It's supported technically by something called IETF Administration LLC, which is another non-profit under US law, but the IETF itself is just a group of people who've chosen to collaborate voluntarily. The W3C is a much more corporate model, largely because Tim didn't like the IETF model of rough consensus, especially when he didn't agree with it. To this day Tim dislikes the fact that the rough consensus was to say "Uniform Resource Locator" (instead of his preferred "Universal"). [RFC 1738, published December 1994]

====

I didn’t realize he felt that way about rough consensus.  To see what might have caused him to feel that way, I looked at some old URI WG email, and found some rather spirited (IMO) discussions between himself and several of the other WG participants, such as [1].

--gregbo

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/uri/muZuR_O6Y8hY3ylD2RkWZm27MI4/