> From: Elwyn Davies [mailto:elwynd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] > I hope not, but I fear you are correct. IMO Much of this > stems from the ossification and 'lowest common denominator' > nature of the deployed network, Arguably, the > network/protocol suite is senile and truly novel, > architecturally valid improvements are close to impossible > because the network cannot adapt to them. The IETF is trying > to prevent death rather than enhance life. The ossification is not necessary. There are technical reasons and political reasons but both are fixable. The technical issue is that we lack a network policy layer so there is no way to code the statement 'I support legacy SMTP and Multi-media messaging protocol 2.3' or statements of the form 'all SMTP mail from this address is signed using S/MIME'. That is what domain centric is all about addressing in the general case. The political issue is that changing the infrastructure takes a lot of buy in and has to be driven by a deployment plan that addresses the pain points recognized by the people being asked to buy in. NAT and IPv6 are not recognized as critical pain points by any people I know of outside the IETF. I don't think you will find anyone else who puts them in their top five list of things they need to get done. That is an unfortunate situation but not an impossible one. What we need to do is to devise a technical infrastructure which addresses at least one of the top two pain points that specific parties recognise and also addresses the issues that we think need to be addressed. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf