I'd actually settle for just replying to this with "Me too", really, and perhaps I should have - but one additional comment:
On Sun, 1 Oct 2023 at 19:40, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/1/23 14:21, S Moonesamy wrote:
> From what I recall, the IESG members disclose the name of their
> employers. It should be possible for figure out whether an IESG
> member is primarily focused on their employer's interests.
It's not only participants' employers' interests that I'm concerned
about. The normalization of corporate culture in IETF has done
tremendous harm to IETF and its ability to serve the Internet
community. For example very many people have abandoned the concept of
interoperability (at least at layers above transport) and vendor
independence, in favor of the idea that the Internet exists to support
proprietary applications.
Further, those applications which are supposedly interoperable - like mail - are extremely difficult to host without using ${BIGCORP}'s services if you want to interoperate with the same few large providers.
Most of the recent changes to SMTP hosting requirements (going back to DMARC at least) seem to be entirely driven by the needs of a few mass hosting providers, rather than massive numbers of smaller hosting providers. If the IETF objects at all it is ignored. Interoperability is of less importance if you've only got a small handful of providers. I'm not yet sure what the equivalent will be for the Web, but I'm sure it'll come - already, as far as I can tell you're only allowed to have an opinion on the browser side if you happen also to have a browser with significant share of the market; the hosting side will probably go the same way at some stage.
The outcome of this is that although there are thousands upon thousands of smaller internet-related companies, very few of these will see the IETF (or W3C) as even remotely relevant to their actions - despite being entirely reliant on its output - because hosting will be done by IETF "members". So these voices are unheard at the IETF, because the membership fee - sorry, attendance costs - are simply too high to warrant the (irrelevant) expenditure.
There is a circle here, and I doubt it's virtuous.
Dave.
