I’ve seen a couple of comments that participants are being priced out of remote participation, but I don’t understand why that should be the case.
If you haven’t already done so, it might be worth reading draft-ietf-shmoo-remote-fee-09, which is in the RFC editor queue, so should become an RFC shortly.
My interpretation of the current state of play is:
- Companies that can afford to pay for their employees to participate remotely should pay (to share the costs of running the meeting).
- However, the IETF consensus is that fees should never be a barrier to remote participation, and hence if they ever are, then it is entirely
reasonable and appropriate to make use of the free option not to pay for remote attendance (currently implemented as a fee waiver).
So, if SMEs have people who they would like to attend remotely, but they cannot afford or justify the remote fee, then IMO, making use of the fee waiver is entirely reasonable and justifiable, even
if no justification needs to be provided.
Regards,
Rob
From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Dave Cridland
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2023 9:07 AM
To: Christian Huitema <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Pay fees to set the direction
+1. As Phill says, we can trace many big concentrations effects to
defects in our specification, and specially to security issues.
Yes, that's certainly the primum mobilis, as it were.
Phill mentions the relation between spam and email concentration. I
believe that he is right, and in fact the DINRG workshop on
concentration in the Internet outlined the same issues
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-dinrg-a-quick-summary-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-internet-june-3-2021-01).
We see the same kind of concentration happening in CDN servers because
it is too hard to defend against DDOS just by yourself, and it is
starting to happen in the concentration of DNS servers for similar
reasons. Lesson: if the IETF is not ready to address issues, big
companies will.
You might deplore that Google and Microsoft dominate email, but it is
certainly not because their are flooding the IETF with representatives.
No, in the case of DMARC, for example, the IETF was entirely ignored and was presented with a fait accompli.
But more broadly, I'm not "anti-Google", I'm "pro-SME". The fact that it's very hard to talk about the way that standardisation and the internet in general is being increasingly stacked against smaller providers in a structural way without
coming across as an anti-Google fanatic is probably part of the problem.
(In case you wonder, my email is hosted on Google, because - amongst other reasons - it became too difficult for me to devote the time in hosting it myself, and I wanted a good provider).
Their success is largely due to their capacity to isolate users from
spam. Spam itself derives from a fundamental choice for openness in
email design -- let anyone send or receive email from everyone. That
choice predates the creation of Google...
That being said, large companies do have a big influence on the
Internet, largely for technical reasons. I see that in the evolution of
transport protocols. A big part of the current efforts is to address the
"tail" of the distributions, covering a lot of diverse conditions. A
large company with a large market share is going to have a large amount
of data about those diverse conditions.
Yes, but not all the diverse conditions. Using the same example of DMARC, mailing lists were badly broken - but mailing lists were broadly insignificant to the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. It's not that the problems DMARC aims to solve
(broadly successfully) weren't worth solving, it's the problems it created by ignoring use cases that didn't apply to those involved in solving the problems.
It's a risky suggestion to go from "The IETF doesn't consider the problems of scale" to "The IETF should only consider the problems of scale" and say it's to improve diversity of input.
Participants from that company
will be able to share this data and gain influence in the working groups
discussing the issues.
This, taken alone, is very good. I'm not arguing against that at all. Big companies will always have a naturally big presence, with vital input.
My concern, though, is that smaller providers and use cases are in extremis outright ignored, and in many cases priced out of the market.
I can absolutely assure you that the vast majority of SMEs are not interested in giving employees three additional weeks of paid holiday with flights, hotels, and conference fees included. We don't really discuss anything on mailing lists
beyond when and where to have the next in-person interim. It used to be that we could avoid that by participating remotely - which was awful, but better than nothing - but that's been priced out of reach as well.
Part of the problem here - possibly all of it - is that those three weeks of holiday don't have an ROI. It is very unlikely that someone from an SME can influence anything in a WG, even if they do pay to play. There are exceptions, of course,
but my gut feeling is that these apply mostly to areas where the huge providers have no interest.
Lesson: the more we openly share data about
various sides of the Internet experience, the more we level the playing
field.
I strongly agree with your lesson, but I strongly disagree with the implication that the IETF is acting upon it.
-- Christian Huitema
On 10/2/2023 2:11 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> I agree that there is a problem here but it is not the cost of membership.
>
> The real problem is that the Internet has grown so big and the companies
> that provide the bulk of Internet apps and services have grown so large
> that there are no institutions that have much influence over them.
>
> We saw this early in the development of Internet payment schemes, the
> original goal was to manage credit card payments from a secure wallet, SSL
> was supposed to be a stopgap. But by the time schemes like SEPP were
> getting going, the big Internet retail outlets saw no need to support any
> technology that would level the playing field for smaller players.
>
> Rather bizarrely, employees of the provider of the largest Web browser by
> market share participate in discussions of new features for its main
> competitor and is also the main source of funding.
>
> I expect we will soon be seeing another ridiculous book from The
> 'Independent' Institute telling us network effects don't exist but bought
> and paid for by a different sponsor this time.
>
>
> The only way out of the current situation is to face up to the issues that
> led to centralization in the first place. For email, it was spam. A
> protocol in which authentication of messages is optional and lacking access
> control on message receipt will inevitably face a very high level of abuse
> and the only way to deal with that abuse is going to be expensive
> heuristics.
>
> If people want to have a decentralized Internet, we have to design the
> systems for social scaling. We also have to look for opportunities.
> Currently, the markets for messaging and email are entirely and
> artificially disjointed. While voice and video are loosely tied to
> messaging, the balkanization of messaging provision makes them very much
> less useful than they could be.
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 1, 2023 at 10:44 PM Dave Cridland <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
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