Jon Postel Re: 202210301538.AYC

Wed Nov 2 12:33:35 UTC 2022

Dear William:

0) "Internet Vendor Task Force indeed.":  Thank you so much in 
distilling this thread one more step for getting even closer to its essence.

1)  The ITU charter is explicit in that governments are the parties who 
sponsor the Recommendations, then implement them as desired, 
respectively as well as dealing with the outcome, no matter it is good 
or bad, since there is no scapegoat.

2)  The IETF is implicitly sponsored by businesses to create RFCs then 
impose them on (although may be called voluntarily adopted by) players 
internationally, without claiming much responsibility for its effects to 
the society. That is, the wealth of the citizens is extracted by the 
businesses through RFCs starting from treating IP addresses as private 
properties, while the governments bear the burden of dealing with the 
negative effects such as cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

3)  It appears to me that by mentally branding ITU type of UN 
organizations "evil", the delicate balance between Cause & Consequence 
has been broken in the Internet era, with the businesses taking 
advantage of the first "C" for the benefit of their "shareholders" 
(creating billionaire CEOs, COOs, CFOs, etc.) while leaving the second 
"C" for the governments and the poor peasants to endure. I am not sure 
whether this is an improved operation model.

4)  No wonder that there was an APNIC Labs Policy notes about "The 
Internet's Gilded Age" sometime ago. We need to recognize this root 
cause and begin to take corrective actions for navigating out of it.

https://labs.apnic.net/?p=973

Regards,

Abe (2022-11-02 08:32 EDT)

On 2022-11-01 01:31, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> 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.
>

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