From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
>> so "let the market decide" is a lousy rule. there's no
>> justification
>> for it.
> People should generally reject religious fundamentalism, including
> what you said there. If you have an a priori case for this or that,
> fine, but you seem to be making a mystical argument for a wildly
> generalized claim.
for some, "let the market decide" is a religious statement. it's
generally based on an unexamined faith in market conditions as an
effective way of making a good choice among competing technologies.
For some it may be so (I agree) but apparently not you are I.
All I mean is that, for higher level protocols, letting people do what
they will ("the market decides") seems to me to be the best option.
Yes, using your example, IM protocols fragment, interop suffers,
there's lots of crap --- so what? It looks like it will probably sort
out. Fretting over how best to impose governance over the situation
doesn't obviously accomplish anything. There are faster, better,
cheaper ways I think to get universally adapted standards in motion
than wrangling with committees.
The main practical utility of standards very high in the stack is that
they are written clearly, widely reviewed, and generally agreeable to
people. One doesn't need a complicated government to support the
development of standards with that utility: a few mailing lists and
archives do most of the trick. Processes in which there is nothing
available to fight over seem like the most efficient to me. That this
kind of anti-process process is even an option is a tribute to the
historical success of IETF but it would be weird to postulate a need
for IETF to do much more than what's already been done, imo, other
than to maintain the lower layers.
Surely there are grey areas but those don't strike me as obviously IETF's
business. For example, since IM is used in life-critical applications,
regulation may be in order -- but that's not a good role for IETF either.
It's swell to have leading experts advise regulation but having that occur
via IETF adds no value (and costs efficiency).
the speaker may hope that by exploiting some people's misguided
faith in market conditions, and exploiting the tendency of the
market to make poor decisions, he can silence those who would
propose a better way to do it.
You are absolutely right, imo, that jerks regularly try the trick that
you describe and that that's a serious problem that deserves
attention. It's the conclusions you draw from that that I don't quite
get.
Anyway, thank you for the uptake and I am starting to feel overextended
on my justification for posting to this list so, while I'm not against
replying further -- I'll be tending to return to my seat now.
-t
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