--On Saturday, June 29, 2024 09:54 -0400 Keith Moore
<moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 6/29/24 08:20, John C Klensin wrote:
>
>> From my point of view, this is mostly about the IETF's credibility
>> when we establish standards and at least implicitly encourage
>> others to use them. If we do not or cannot use those standards in
>> our own work, and avoid doing so without public and understandable
>> explanations, it calls everything we are doing into question.
>
> +1
>
> But I want to go further than that. If IETF insists that it
> needs to outsource essential services that are based on IETF
> protocols, that doesn't speak well for those protocols.
Keith,
The reason I am suggesting a careful, public, and fairly prominent
explanation for our decision to outsource to an organization that
does not support IPv6 (for email in this case) is precisely to
separate the protocols and their quality/ usability/ appropriateness
from what is essentially an administrative (maybe economic as well as
management) decision. I think it is also appropriate for us to make
it clear that we would be much happier with the chosen vendor/
supplier if they supported mail (and other protocols) over IPv6 even
if other considerations (including "no one we could find is any
better about that") dictate that we choose them anyway.
It seems to me that, in the above, you are making a different
argument, i.e., that the IETF should not be outsourcing _any_
important ("essential") service that runs on the Internet since
substantially every protocol is either our work or resting on it.
While I got started a bit before you did, I was convinced for many
years that one of the main attractions of the Internet architecture
(and, to only a slightly lesser degree, the ARPANET with NCP and
friends before it) was that they enabled local services and peer to
peer protocols rather than relatively tiny client machines and giant,
sometimes distributed, servers. I am still not convinced that
putting everything into centrally managed "cloud" servers is the
right thing to do, especially when I see efforts to change and
optimize protocols for that model in ways that could impede or
disadvantage more distributed models.. I even draw some comfort
from seeing things as cyclic, going back to the early iterations of
single whole-institution (or cluster of institutions) servers
evolving toward departmental machines and then to departments
discovering they didn't really want to be in the computer operations
business and centralizing some things as a result. But it is
unquestionably today's reality and it is not at all clear to me that
asking the IETF LLC to fight that reality (and presumably expand its
staff even more to do so) would be in the best interests of either
the IETF or the Internet more generally.
best,
john
