I have attended many meetings under Chatham house rules, I can't remember doing an IETF meeting under one but would have no problem with that. I would much prefer we had Chatham House than humming.
There are many reasons for holding Chatham House and not necessarily the ones people assume. It is really not about attribution. First thing you learn at corporate spokesperson school is there is no such thing as off the record. If I go off the record with a journalist, it is for the specific purpose of explaining something to them that I have already discovered they are confused on and want to attempt to unconfuse them.
The real advantage of Chatham House it allows people to say something that is incredibly stupid and get reactions.
I can't say what or who of course, but lets say that a person retired from a very senior position says something that is 'could this start a nuclear war' level stupid.
So a hypothetical is then given in about 20 words which the next person reduces to 'redlines require immediately perfect attribution'.
And that counter argument is exactly what the original speaker was looking for in the first place: a concise argument against framing information engagement in the same terms as the nuclear deterrence strategy the participants had developed.
One of the many pathologies of IETF meetings is that they are constructed so that we spend rather too much time arguing for our positions and not enough looking to find the right position.
