I just notice your mail and thought I should respond given that you may have misunderstood something in this email conversation or in one of my responses. When a working group works on a specific problem then they get requirements from many different sources. Some of these requirements may be purely technical (such as performance aspects, encoding related questions, etc.) but there are also requirements that come from the desire to meet certain deployment constraints. Often protocols build on top of something existing; they do not make the assumption of a clean slate. By doing this they take business models into consideration, and consider a certain type of responsibility sharing. There may also be regulatory actions that influenced the work. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-morris-policy-cons-00 summarize these observations. It is not an IAB document but, as the filename indicates, an individual submission. The authors are soliciting input from the IETF community on the document and to share their protocol development experience with us. In any case, there are many requirements and the large number of guidelines we have protocol developers reflect this. Protocol design is not easy. Since a single person typically does not have the complete range of expertise needed we make use of directorates as well in the development of high-quality specifications. Despite all these different sources for requirements the actual result (the output of the working group) is a technical specification. It may provide background information, instructions for implementers or for those who deploy. The IAB and ISOC documents you mentioned in your other mails are slightly different. IAB documents, for example, may provide broader architectural advice. RFC 2804 "IETF Policy on Wiretapping" is such a document (written by IESG/IAB). Again other documents concern the core role of the IAB, such as the RFC Editor and IANA. You like to call everything "politics" particularly if you do not like a certain argument. This is not a particularly useful approach since it does not help me (and maybe others) to get insight into the argument you are trying to make. Ciao Hannes (speaking for myself as an individual contributor to the IETF standardization process) On Mar 23, 2011, at 5:43 PM, todd glassey wrote: > On 3/23/2011 12:02 AM, Hannes Tschofenig wrote: >> On Mar 23, 2011, at 6:52 AM, SM wrote: >> >>> The IETF can only address the technical problems. >> >> This is an argument I often hear. I do, however, believe that you cannot see technology in isolation. > > That's because you are being a political animal and not a pure technologist here which violates the charter of the IETF in spades. > > If the IETF is only set up to standardize technology then it cannot refuse to accept anything, further its members who try and block protocol's standardization regularly commit antitrust and TI by sabotaging various initiatives, and IMHO they need to be formally spanked (by lawyers) and sent to bed with no supper. There is no political or legal activity of the IETF in its standardization practice and it cannot implement social policy around what it standardizes and doesn't IMHO. >> However, in many cases the technology, regulatory environment, business aspects, and the social context gets mixed together. >> Please have a look at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-morris-policy-cons-00 > only in the limited world of Social Networking... > > Todd Glasssey > > >> Ciao >> Hannes >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Ietf mailing list >> Ietf@xxxxxxxx >> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf >> > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf