[ih] This Review is for Everyone

[Greg Skinner]

On Mar 12, 2026, at 12:25 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On 3/12/26 09:40, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> On 3/12/2026 9:28 AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote:
>>> Like it or not, all the legal existence of the IETF is subordinate to the Internet Society.
>> 
>> 
>> Ahh.  So the IETF did not exist before ISOC.  And if ISOC disappeared, so would the IETF.
>> 
>> Good to know.
>> 
>> d/
>> 
> Not what I remember.....
> 
> In early 1983, I was a member of the ICCB - the precursor to the IAB.   The ICCB was formed by Vint several years earlier, to serve as an advisory board to Vint at ARPA, setting priorities and plans, and then making them happen.  The ICCB was composed of individuals from the various organizations related to the Internet, e.g., Jon Postel, Dave Mills, Jim Mathis, Dave Clark, Bob Braden, Ed Cain, Ray McFarland, and myself, all invited by Vint to be members.  Hope I didn't miss anyone....   Bob Kahn called it "Vint's Cabinet".   After each meeting we would all go back to our respective organizations and do what we could to focus on the plans and priorities.
> 
> I recall one ICCB meeting, sometime around early 1983, when Vint announced he was leaving ARPA to go to MCI.  ARPA's Internet projects would subsequently be led by Barry Leiner.  In the ICCB discussions a plan emerged to organize the various projects on two tracks as part of the handoff.  The "research" efforts would be organized as the IRTF (Internet Research Task Force), led by Dave Clark.  The "engineering" efforts would be organized as the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), led by Phil Gross.
> 

I have seen references to an “Internet Engineering Task Force” that existed prior to the first meeting of the IETF [1] in articles such as this one about Barry Leiner. [2] A quote from the article:

A number of Task Forces were created under the IAB including one called "Internet Engineering", which ultimately gained responsibility for managing the other task forces; these were later renamed "working groups" except for those that were clearly associated with research, which were assembled into "research groups" of the Internet Research Task Force. By agreement with the IAB in the early 1990s, the hands-on responsibility for the Internet standards was passed from the IAB to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) leadership. The IAB continued to play an important role in overseeing certain aspects of the work of the IETF and in developing independent views on critical architectural matters concerning the Internet. For many years, Leiner had the ultimate responsibility for the development of this part of the Internet organizational structure, which he oversaw during the mid-1980s.

> Lots of actions helped propel projects down that pipeline.   I don't know for sure, but I always thought that the government members of the ICCB (Vint from Arpa and Ed and Ray from DoD) played a role in getting some of the non-technical actions to occur.  One example is the change in procurement regulations so that all the big government contractors were required to have TCP implemented in their deliverables.  Another was the creation by NBS (now NIST) of a program to certify that TCP had been implemented correctly, thus providing a means for all those contractors to contractually "prove" that they had actually implemented TCP.
> 
> I don't know much about the history of ISOC and the IETF.  But I've always wondered how and why things changed between 1983 and now.
> 
> In 1983 the Internet was an orchestrated project focused on meeting military communications requirements.  The government(s) controlled the direction and deployment through funding and regulations.
> 
> Today, the Internet is a global project with fuzzy requirements to meet all sorts of business and human needs, and seems driven mostly by market forces.
> 
> The early IETF was an organization of engineers focused on making the technology work to meet the requirements.  The IETF has evolved into a standards body, which puts technical solutions "on the shelf" and assumes someone who needs them will adopt and deploy as they see fit, but there seems to be no way to verify that a technology from the shelf is actually in place.
> 
> How did that evolution happen...?
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to go into details right now, but I believe that such activities are still occurring.  They're just not something that someone who is not involved in those activities would know about.  At the very least, one has to follow the IETF working groups who are involved in those activities.  For example, there is an Internet Technologies Research Group within NIST that is actively involved with IETF working groups. [3]

--gregbo

[1] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/01.pdf
[2] https://www.ithistory.org/honor-roll/barry-m-leiner
[3] https://www.nist.gov/ctl/wireless-networks-division/internet-technologies-research-group