Dear Christian,
At 08:05 PM 09-07-2019, Christian Huitema wrote:
I personally think that the "wider technical community" of potential
RFC publishers is a pious myth. I think it already was during the
Arpanet project: the wider community included a bunch of non-US
research networks, but these researchers rarely published in
There is a book which described the IETF as serving as ground-zero
for the Internet technical community. Nowadays, the term is
ambiguous as it has been used to describe different entities.
There is indeed some amount of RFC that come through the independent
stream. But these documents are typically part of the IETF "sphere":
documentation of protocols in order to get a code point in one of
the IANA registries, documentation of existing protocols as part of
WG proposals or dissenting voices in the IETF process. All that is
great and useful but these documents are largely IETF centric, even
if they are not produced directly by the IETF. Their authors are
very often participating in the IETF process, and arguably part of
the IETF community.
There are different processes for maintaining the technical
identifiers; the IETF process is one of them. There are also
participants who are involved in more than one of those
decision-making processes. I doubt that the IETF community, as
represented by this mailing list, would be viewed as the acceptable
venue for decision-making when the decision is about a matter which
goes beyond IETF standardization.
There are other standards development organizations which are active
in the development of protocols and standards. Those organizations
have their own publication mechanisms.
I think we should not try defer to a mythical community. Mythical
entities create poor accountability. Power hiding behind a mythical
entity is power without balance, and that's not a good way to
construct the future.
The folklore is not a substitute for a proper accountability
mechanism. From the outside, it is useful to consider whether the
decision-making process would be viewed as legitimate.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
