My thoughts on reading the IPv6 H/H Option discussion: Some technical decisions about the Internet protocol suite are more important that others. Decisions about application-layer issues are of course important to particular segments of the community and industry, but decisions that impinge on the fundamental communication mechanism of the Internet are critical to us all. Such decisions must be made very, very carefully, with considerable care and not a little wisdom. History has established the IETF as the body responsible for decisions about the fundamental structure of the Internet. W3C certainly can set standards at the application layer, for example, but decisions about the waist of the "hour glass" belong in the IETF. We need to take this responsibility seriously, and waste less time on lawyering the procedures. You cannot provide "adult supervision" over the Internet protocol suite with a committee of 2000 people; you have to delegate a major responsibility to a small group of technical experts. Technocratic democracy is fine up to a point, but ... After Kobe, the IETF established the IESG and IAB as twin oversight bodies with some responsibility to look after the overall technical health of the Internet, especially the important parts. As a member of the RFC Editor team, I have had the privilege to sitting in IESG meetings now and then, and I know from that experience that the IESG takes this responsibility very, very seriously, as they ought. It is true that the IETF has no strict control over what bits people choose to put into IP headers, but in fact we have a lot of influence. We can bring quite a bit of informal pressure against renegade (from our viewpoint) companies or bodies. For example, the Host Requirements RFCs successfully deprecated and effectively eliminated a number of technical deviations. So the registration process is important and gives us some leverage, as long as we continue to act as adults. I agree with the comments made by Joel Halpern yesterday. Bob Braden _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf