> I'd like to hear the IETF community's input on the topic. IMHO: IETF has limited resources, and as such, it cannot investigate every solution that someone might propose for every problem that exists or is thought to exist on the Internet. IETF leadership has to choose where to invest those resources. Such choices are significantly informed by the expressed interests of IETF participants. In short, IETF works on what its participants want to work on. It cannot effectively work on a proposal that has little or no support from its participants. We try to be reasonably open to new proposals from anywhere, as long as there are people to work on them, and we hope that this makes it easy for people with really good ideas to develop/standardize them in the IETF. But there's always a chance that IETF might miss a useful solution to some problem because that solution originates from outside of IETF. There's nothing that IETF can do about that situation. The fact that this situation exists can even be useful for IETF - it can help IETF retain a sense of humility that makes it easier for IETF participants to accurately judge the value of technical contributions. (though of course we do still make mistakes!) Similarly, there will always be people who feel that they've somehow been shafted by IETF. But nothing stops those people from taking their proposals to other standards bodies, from starting their own advocacy groups for those proposals, or from trying to get vendors to implement their propsals without the imprimatur of a standards body. All of these strategies are successfully employed on a regular basis. But neither do such people have the rights to demand support from IETF - that would be tantamount to putting words in the mouths of IETF participants - forcing them to lie about their technical assessments and where their interests are. Folks who think that IETF has screwed them because it didn't support their proposal have the burden of demonstrating both that their proposals are technically sounder than any other proposals that were supported; and that that there was a significant constituency who was willing to do the work on their proposal, in IETF, and under IETF rules. If they can't do that, they are wasting our time and theirs, and they should go elsewhere. Keith