Hi Harald, > > What the DISPATCH process fails to achieve is what a good directorate should have been doing: Taking a view of the whole area of the protocol suite, and noticing things like: > > * SIP is largely non-interoperable. It’s useful to connect islands of a single product while claiming standards conformance, and it’s easier to wrangle into some semblance of interoperability than proprietary protocols - but it’s not “plug and play”. > * SDP is a world picture that is not capable of representing a significant subset of the interesting ways in which people want to interconnect. This means that solutions that use SDP have to work around SDP, not with it. > * RTP is showing its age. Security is a bolt-on, and RTCP is more of an extension platform than it is an useful set of features in the base spec. Could you point to IETF directorates that have fixed problems of a similar caliber in other areas in the recent past? It would help to understand the keys to their success. > > It’s clear that the industry needs a robust, interoperable, secure protocol suite for real time communication. It’s also clear that the IETF is the logical venue for that to happen. > > > But DISPATCH isn’t the way to get there. I don’t think anyone is claiming such lofty ambitions for DISPATCH, or recommending it as a model to accomplish what you describe above in other areas. I agree with you that DISPATCH is not a mechanism for re-designing or replacing whole protocol suites. We don’t have a mechanism to do that efficiently. DISPATCH is a mechanism for organizing work that IETF participants want to bring into the area. It strikes me that re-designing and replacing whole protocol suites is a challenge that pervades pretty much every area of networking, that no area has particularly great solutions for, and that requires activity both inside and outside the IETF. Personally I’m totally open to ideas for how we can improve upon the status quo in ART, but I think pointing the finger at DISPATCH for the cruft in the real-time protocol suite is misplacing blame. Alissa