On 4/17/2014 12:57 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
Indeed. We have had warnings about where the ability of anyone
to post anything and then claim IETF approval in external
contexts without any fear of meaningful pushback would lead for
a long time. It hasn't been significantly damaging before
because (i) we have been lucky and (ii) attempts to manipulate
the mechanisms have come from outsiders, not insiders. With
DMARC, the ability to claim IETF responsibility when that is
handy and that the IETF has no control when _that_ is handy have
now been utilized by insiders.
We are constantly confusing someone's attempted effect with their actual
effect.
We need to stop giving other people control over the IETF that way.
Merely by making a claim, the get us to we scurry into fearful action,
believing we have to prevent such claims. We are allowing them to
conduct a denial of service attack on us. Or rather, by us on ourselves.
> That comes after a history of
the less effective approach of bringing specs into IETF WGs and
then claiming that fundamentals cannot be changed because they
were developed by experts in another forum. As I think Ned
suggested, the ADSP issue and how it was handled should have
been another warning sign. And, with Yahoo's move and its
consequences (whether they anticipated them or not), we also ran
out of luck.
With some regularity, over the decades, a large vendor or provider has
applied a standard -- or modified it -- in a way other than it was
designed to cover.
What I suggested is that we need to have a serious discussion
of what, if anything can be done to ameliorate the damage in
this case. Others have suggested that we also need to look at
how to prevent this from happening in the future. I concur.
agreed.
The IETF has no leverage for preventing the independent and
consequential actions of a large player in the market.
I'm also concerned that several of these efforts represent back
door approaches to deprecating multi-hop email.
Well, that's a substantive point. And unfortunately I agree with the
concern. In fact, it has been impressive to see how readily some
industry folk dismiss concerns about more complex uses of email, such as
multi-administration handling of mail in transit.
One /can/ imagine the IETF producing a BCP about the consequences of
applying it's technologies in various ways that change email's utility.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net