Greg Skinner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Karl Auerbach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>There is still no need to set aside special seats for corporations or
>>organizations.
>>Nobody is stopping corporations/organizations from sending people to
>>participate *as* individuals.
>>The IETF works on the basis of individuals and not companies.
>>Company C and company M send lots of folks to participate and hence
>>tend to have a bigger voice than company I.
>>But since the participation is by individual, the merit of issues
>>tends to rise to the top and be the basis for standards or
>>decisionmaking.
>I actually think the IETF is a model organization for this type of
>project. However, I don't know that the man or woman on the street
>feels likewise.
My guess is that there are problems with the IETF, expecially since the
U.S. govt support for it has been withdrawn which I thought happened
just a year or two ago.
I have heard from a friend who tried to participate in it as she is from
an academic situation in another country. She proposed an RFC
from her work and couldn't afford to go to the meeting because
since she works in academic and the IETF doesn't function via supporting
papers, she was unable to get funding to go. Her suggested RFC
was ignored and the mailing list then went onto other topics.
The prevalence of corporate support for those who represent corporate
interests, seems less matched by the ability of those in the academic
world to participate.
So there do seems to be problems that need to be taken up, but
instead of the ability to take them up, there is the pressure to
further corporatize the IETF processes.
And the meeting I went to in Munich (I was in Germany anyway) had
a number of folks at it who came from different environments,
but it seemed the majority of issues being taken up were those
having to do with security and other commercially relevant issues.
The working group I found to go to which was about noncommercial
issues had to do with connecting school. There was an interesting
presentation by someone from Germany about how they had
developed a generic interface for schools to the Internet using
linux since they didn't want individual schools tried to the
proprietary interfaces of different service providers. But
then the meeting didn't really open itself to questions of what
would be of interest to discuss, but then went over reading
through some draft about the need to hire a system person for
each school. Thus it was a bit of a wasted to have been there.
Thus though the IETF has a very proud history, it is also being racked
by the commercialization wind. It seems especially important that
that be recognized as this ICANN pressure will only make that worse.
And why the IETF should be subordinate to ICANN is also a serious
question. I thought the IETF wasn't to take up policy issues,
and yet to not do so, leaves them to the mercy of
ICANN who has no understanding of the technology or basis
to take up and determine policy regarding IETF issues.
Ronda
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Netizens: On the History and Impact
of Usenet and the Internet
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
in print edition ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
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