Theodore Tso wrote: > To quote from Christian Huitema's, "Network Protocols and Standards" > as to what happened: > > We thought that our wording was very careful, and we were > prepared to discuss it and try to convince the Internet > community. ... > The IAB had no right to make such a > decision alone. Besides, CLNP was a pale imitation of IP.
This wasn't about careful wording or reporters getting ahold of the story. This was about a premature and preemptive decision by the IAB. The nature of the need for a revision to IP had been under consideration by an assigned committee, for some time. The discussion about possible solutions had had almost no discussion at all. In fact, CLNP was a serious candidate. While some folk rejected it because of its ISO genes, that wasn't much of a focus at the time. Of more concern was the significant lack of large scale experience with it. That made the question more of a classic make-vs-buy issue. Could the IETF satisfy the needs of expanded address space with a small change to IPv4? > Engineering Task Force (IETF). The incident triggered a serious > reorganization of the whole IETF decision process, revising the > role of managing bodies such as the Internet Engineering Steering > Group (IESG) or the Internet Architecture Board, the new > appellation of the IAB. A phrase like "serious reorganization" leads folk to miss how small the changes were, structurally. The existing structure of the IETF was retained. From the standpoint of organization structure, the changes were minimal, although of course they had huge impact. There were only two changes: 1. Decisions previously made by the IAB would now be made by the IESG 2. A formal and independent selection process for the IAB and IESG would be instituted. The IAB was retained but careful to avoid anything that looked like an attempt to exercise power. Over time, if found very useful tasks for itself. The question, today, seems to be whether it is moving too far into an exercise of powers it ought not to have. This isn't anything like the Boston Tea Party situation -- the organizational change was made at the IETF in Danville, whereas the offending decision was made in Kobe Japan -- since it is incremental and is clearly being reviewed as things change. The discussion taking place on this list would either not have taken place or would have been an exercise in futility. (I suppose it still might be, but for different reasons...) > At the time, there was a feeling that the IAB was "out of touch", and +1 Working group could go through their entire process of developing a specification and consensus around it, only to have the IAB reject it out of hand. > At least for the years when I was on Nomcom, the > IAB did not request access to any of the questionaires or comments > from the community; all we provided was 2-3 paragraphs describing some > of the concerns and summarizing at a high level what the concerns > which drove us to replace an incumbent and why we chose a particular > new AD. > > It seems that since then, the IAB has been more assertive about > wanting more information, and I really think we need to consider where > the line is between performing due diligence and "redoing the work of > the NOMCOM". Right. The current discussion should try to specify what exactly the boundaries and requirements for a confirming body are and what input is reasonable for them to have. > I'm not sure it was 90/10 consensus; at least in this recent > discussion, there certainly have been a rather wide range of opinions > on this list, from people like Mike St. John's with one view, and > Steve Kent with another. There is a wide range of opinion in our community, for pretty much any topic. That's one of the reasons we do not require unanimity. Saying that there was a 90% consensus is a very different datum. The IETF tends to let a few noisy folk veto rough consensus. While such folk sometime have concerns that are useful to address, trying to attend to those concerns is a different task from insisting that the concerns be satisfied. d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
