Jon Postel Re: 202210301538.AYC

Tue Nov 1 05:31:38 UTC 2022

On 10/31/22 9:27 AM, Donald Eastlake wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:37 AM Vasilenko Eduard via NANOG
> <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:
>>
>> 1.       What is going on on the Internet is not democracy even formally, because there is no formal voting.
>> 3GPP, ETSI, 802.11 have voting. IETF decisions are made by bosses who did manage to gain power (primarily by establishing a proper network of relationships).
>> It could be even called “totalitarian” because IETF bosses could stay in one position for decades.
> 
> I do not see how it can be called totalitarian given the IETF Nomcom
> appointment and recall mechanisms. Admittedly it is not full on
> Sortition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition) but it is just one
> level of indirection from Sortition. (See
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/08/20/indirection-the-unsung-hero-of-software-engineering/?sh=2cc673587f47)
> 

Donald helped setup this Nomcom system, based upon his experience in the
F&SF community WorldCon.  Credit where credit is due, and our thanks!

Randy Bush has also had some cogent thoughts over the years.

Once upon a time, I'd proposed that we have some minimum eligibility
requirements, such as contributing at least 10,000 lines of code, and/or
*operational* experience.  Certain IESG members objected (who stuck
around for many years).

Once upon a time, IETF did have formal hums.  That went by the wayside
with IPSec.  Photuris won the hum (overwhelmingly).  We had multiple
interoperable international independent implementations.

Then Cisco issued a press release that they were supporting the US NSA
proposal.  (Money is thought to have changed hands.)  The IESG followed.

Something similar happened with IPv6.  Cisco favored a design where only
they had the hardware mechanism for high speed forwarding.  So we're
stuck with 128-bit addresses and separate ASNs.

Again with high speed fiber (Sonet/SDH).  The IESG overrode the existing
RFC with multiple independent implementations in favor of an unneeded
extra convolution that only those few companies with their own fabs could
produce.  So that ATT/Lucent could sell lower speed tier fractional links.

Smaller innovative companies went out of business.

Of course, many of the behemoths that used the standards process to
suppress competitors via regulatory arbitrage eventually went out of
business too.

Internet Vendor Task Force indeed.