Brian writes > Sigh. That's exactly my point; our stewardship role is really > limited to advocacy and to providing better altermatives. I > don't see where you can find "special pleading", "vast > political influence", "force" or "anointed" in what I wrote. > I think we would do well to avoid polemic language on this list. I was replying to the wider debate identified in the original subject line there. I was not disagreeing with your points. I thought that was clear. I disagree with your point about advocacy, I think the IETF can do a bit more than that. There is a common assumption that the role of the IETF standards process is to decide what is used on the net. The idea being that once something is agreed as a standard it will automatically be implemented and used. This way of thinking is likely to lead to disappointment. A much more useful way to think about the IETF (or OASIS or W3C) is that it is one place where you can meet others to build the necessary support constituency to achieve deployment. Most folk get it, a few don't. BitTorrent has succeeded (so far) without IETF involvement. There might well be a point in the future where an IETF group could help further deployment. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf