> Behalf Of Spencer Dawkins > Call me a dreamer, but if there's one voice (which may or may not be > from another planet) in a working group, the chair's > responsibility is > to decide if this is one of the hopefully rare cases where one voice > SHOULD derail apparent consensus, and if it's not - to say so! The problem I was thinking of was more of the pre-consensus type. Where you have one or two persons banging on ad-nauseam claiming that a proposal is going to cripple large ISPs, one or two people from those large ISPs saying 'that is not a problem' and a lot of folk who don't want to comment on the issue because they don't feel they understand it. I think that when you are talking about alleged show stopper issues you have to take into account the affiliations of the people raising the issues if you are going to arrive at a deployable spec in a timely manner. > I understand the apparent advantage of saying, "well, if X > says it's a > good idea, X is from a large ISP, so they are probably right", but > this doesn't prevent the second-order problem that large companies > (ISPs or not) have a range of employee IQs, and if you defer > to one of > the low-order IQs because they work for Y, you may STILL end up in a > bad place. I've seen this bad place personally. That depends on the nature of the show stopper. If the product manager for Yahoo mail says that an issue that has been raised by others as a show stopper for large installations is not a problem and nobody else in a similar position contradicts them then I tend to think that its their funeral if they turn out to be wrong. If on the other hand you have the CTO, VP of Research and Principal Scientist of a major Internet infrastructure company all saying that there is a major show stopper for them and that they won't be able to deploy for several years unless there is a change, I think a group really needs to be able to take the source of the objection into account. > I would hope that we evaluate ideas based on the message in most > cases, and not on the messenger. If that's not what we do in most > cases, I THINK this is a pretty fundamental change in how the IETF > works. I agree this is so in most cases. The problem is that the system does not provide a mechanism for the occasional exception that may be needed. The approach that I have seen be most effective in bringing about infrastructure changes in the Internet has been to get the major stakeholders around a table and get them to put on record their criteria for adoption of some new infrastructure. One model would be to hold such meetings under IETF aegis, another would be to do as was done for email authentication and hold a series of meetings in a range of forums in the hope that the requirements would somehow trickle down to the working group. The first approach would be a major change to the IETF, the second approach may be the reason for various countries complaining that they are effectively excluded from the Internet Governance process. The ad hoc groups very rarely extend beyond North America and when they do it is often only to include other parts of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf