[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[John Day]

And you were never in the many connection/connectionless debates in OSI. There was no  comparison. Tempers were hot, lots of shouting, pounding the table as well as procedural games that were definitely against the procedures. Similar discussions over transport, addressing, even upper layers.

Just convincing X.400 that defining the syntax of message was not a formal description was quite a fight.

You are right. The IPv6 debate came the closest to what had been going on in OSI at that level for over a decade.

It wasn’t fun.

> On May 12, 2026, at 17:55, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> 
> John Day via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn't were very
>> entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter
>> what.
> 
> I'm shocked that you would say that.
> 
> But I'd guess you've never tried to get a simple historical correction
> through the modern IETF.
> 
>> The PTTs absolutely didn't want a Transport Layer or datagrams,
>> when they couldn't stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all
>> they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid.
> 
> This exactly describes what IETF is doing to IPv4.
> 
> They did actively try to kill it -- while it was carrying more than 80%
> of the world's Internet traffic!  There was a whole "sunset4" WG!
> 
> I tried to get the IETF intarea wg to simply work on a draft that said
> that IPv4 is a valid protocol suite that the IETF will continue
> maintaining.  Half of the WG said "no way", the other half said "we're
> already doing it so there's no need to say so".  The result was that no
> draft was accepted, so no statement that IPv4 remains valid was ever
> adopted by the wg or by the IETF.  The factional campaign to kill IPv4
> continues.  The whole history is documented in these expired drafts:
> 
>  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sunset4-ipv6-ietf-01
>  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01
> 
> Meanwhile this IPv6 faction shoots down every other simple proposal that
> straightens out historical kinks in IPv4 that have already been fixed by
> most implementers -- but never written down in a spec.  This has been
> going on for years and years.  And the rest of IETF lets them get away
> with it.
> 
> For example, the lowest address in each subnet was reserved back in 1983
> because the 4.2 BSD UNIX release used it as a broadcast address, before
> IP broadcast was standardized.  This was fixed in the 4.3 BSD release in
> 1986 to use the last address in the subnet (like everyone else).  But
> despite the issue and its resolution being documented in RFCs 1122,
> 1812, and 3021, the lowest-address restriction was never removed in a
> spec.  The lowest address has never since 1986 been used for broadcast,
> nor for anything else.  A mythology grew up about it that the .0 address
> somehow referred to "the whole subnet" and couldn't be used for a
> unicast host.  This wastes many millions of perfectly good addresses
> throughout the Internet, particularly in small subnets like a /29 (with
> only 6 usable addresses rather than 7).
> 
> I and implementers wrote a draft that explained the history, proposed
> standardizing the .0 address as unicast, and demonstrated that it's
> upward compatible because distant hosts can't even tell the difference
> (by definition, they don't know where your subnet starts or ends).  The
> implementers have already straightened it all out and it's running in
> production -- OpenBSD since 2010, NetBSD since 2016, Windows since 2021,
> Linux since 2021, Fedora and Ubuntu since 2022, Android since 2022.
> Amazon has been using these addresses in production since 2021; ping
> 44.192.0.0 or access http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ to check it
> live.  But IETF still refuses to merely document that it works --
> because "it would reduce the pressure for Internet sites to move to
> IPv6"!!!  See the expired Internet-Draft at:
> 
>  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-08
> 
> It's possible that IETF had no entrenched factions "back in the day".
> But the very slow uptake of IPv6 has caused the people who designed IPv6
> to become such a faction.  And the IETF seems to have no working
> defenses against such factions.
> 
> 	John
> 	
> PS: In a completely separate incident, there was the 5-year delay in
> standardizing DNS Security because one or more high-up people in the
> IETF decided that "no standard that requires the use of Jim Bidzos's
> monopoly crypto algorithm (RSA) is ever going to be approved on my
> watch".  Despite having a free DNSSEC license for the patent and for the
> RSA software, and the patent only having three years left to run at that
> time.  Sure, there are no "get our way no matter what" factions in IETF,
> and never have been!