There are cases where it is useful for a group to be able to take notice of first hand experience that comes from employment. For example I am currently reading a somewhat sureal thread in which an individual who clearly has no experience or understanding of running network operations for a large ISP (million plus customers) is lecturing folk on the lack of scalability of a protocol proposed by and already deployed by several ISPs of that type of scale. Another issue that frequently comes up is that people will assert that a proposal to make a new use of DNS will increase load on the system and thus risk bringing down core DNS and thus the Internet. Except in cases where the protocol is catastrophically bad and unnecessarily wasteful of resources these dire predictions have never yet proved true, nor are they likely to - most load on the core DNS is due to attacks and baddly configured DNS systems. Even if the load on the core DNS were to increase the point of the infrastructure is to serve the needs of users, not the other way around. The point I am trying to make here is that we are not dealing with a domain that is entirely academic theory. There are cases where operational experience is significant and affiliation can carry significance. If I hear several major infrastructure providers say that they have examined a proposal and the resource requirements do not cause them concern as far as their operations go I think it is reasonable to give such a statement considerable weight unless there are very good reasons to think otherwise. Likewise I would take a concern raised by several major infrastructure providers that a proposal did have unacceptable resource requirements very seriously, although I would want to see some documentation and explanation of the claim. We do not need to give a veto to major infrastructure providers but there has to be a mechanism that allows companies to raise issues on the record from time to time when they choose. If only to avoid the need to argue at interminable length why a 'scalability issue' is nothing of the sort. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf