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@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-un...)
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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