Hi Dave,
At 02:56 PM 01-10-2023, Dave Cridland wrote:
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.
If I am not mistaken, the technical specifications used for web
browser products are not from the W3C. It could be argued that there
is still open access through a mailing list. Comments, excluding
directorate reviews, are virtually inexistent since "last-calls" were
moved from this mailing list to a separate mailing list.
There is an expectation that an entity which produces standards would
have a balance of interests [1]. Another way to look at it is as
"breath of consensus". Let's say that an entity standardizes cat
food. The individuals participating in the process are affiliated
with large cat food producers and they reach consensus on a
standard. There wasn't a balance of interests or breath of consensus.
I doubt that ${SMALLCORP) would find the "attendance costs"
affordable. There were several discussions about the cost of IETF
participation over the years. There was even an IESG action item on
that. The results are not very positive.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
1. There was a comment from the IAB about that many years ago.
