On 6/29/24 14:49, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Saturday, June 29, 2024 14:00 -0400 Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:On 6/29/24 13:14, John C Klensin wrote:--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.Not buying it, or at least, I disagree. Let me first say that I find it highly inappropriate for such decisions to be made without input from the broader community, since basically those choices present a danger of undermining IETF's core mission.In principle, we actually do not disagree on that one. I do, however, see a difference between decisions that have strategic impact on the IETF or on the Internet more generally and ones that are primarily or entirely administrative or operational. I don't think it would serve anyone well for the community to get bogged down in, or try to micromanage, the latter.
I don't think it serves IETF (or the Internet) well to let its
operational staff unilaterally make decisions about which
protocols to support based only on temporary expediency, when
these choices potentially have long term effects on the success of
those protocols. So I think we do indeed disagree.
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.I'm not actually making that argument. I see a big difference between outsourcing services used by the general public (which has become MUCH larger in, say, the past 20 years), versus outsourcing services used primarily by IETF participants, which is I believe somewhat smaller than it has been at some points in the past.I am not sure I understand what you mean. For example, measured by any of number of senders, number of recipients, or number of messages, email is used much more by the general public than by IETF participants.
Right, but unless I've misunderstood, we're not talking about email provisioning for the whole Internet, but only email provisioning sufficient to support IETF discussions.
(And yes, I do understand that the Internet is much more hostile now than it was in the past. But if IETF keeps assuming that the protocols don't have to change to adapt to that new threat situation, IMO that's naive at best.)
But note that there are two separate questions here: (1) should
IETF operational staff be making these decisions without community
input, and (2) should IETF be trying to adapt the Internet
architecture to be less threatening to hosts in some way, or
otherwise more scalable, to minimize the need for "outsourcing" or
"cloud sourcing" or whatever? (I don't pretend that the answer to
the latter question is at all simple, but I'm trying to remember
if/when we've even considered it.)
Or as others have pointed out in this conversation, maybe IETF
should at least be looking at the conditions that compel
organizations to outsource their services, rather than making that
somebody else's problem.
(Or do we just want to throw in the towel say "the Internet wasnice while it lasted", and we might as well let it atrophy? Because I see far too much of that attitude in IETF these days, and it's appalling.)Again, I agree but, at the same time, it is not clear what can be done. If you suggest that we should be careful about not becoming part of the problem rather than part of a solution, I'd agree even while not, in many cases, thinking we are well-equipped to get out of whatever holes we and others have dug ourselves into.
Well, encouraging a culture of denial in IETF probably isn't helping.
Keith
