On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 12:57 PM, Eric Rosen wrote:
"The purpose of the IETF is to create high quality, relevant, and timely
standards for the Internet."
It is important that this is "For the Internet," and does not include everything that happens to use IP. IP is being used in a myriad of real-world applications, such as controlling street lights, but the IETF does not standardize those applications.
Yes, and towards a possibly more contentious application, see Voice over IP. Lots of VoIP work is being done without involving the internet at all. Used by telecoms for telecoms applications, where "best effort" isn't good enough because it needs to keep working when the power goes out. IP, yes, Internet, no.
Against that you have "voice over internet" which is AKA "voice chat" and already abounds in true internet p2p apps like iChat, GnomeMeeting, and some programs on that other OS. These run on the public internet and benefit from the IETF design paradigms like edge-to-edge (aka end2end) and best effort but also have to accept the relevant drawbacks.
simon
Well, let's test this assertion. Suppose a consortium of electric companies
develops a UDP-based protocol for monitoring and controlling street lights.
It turns out that this protocol generates an unbounded amount of traffic
(say, proportional to the square of the number of street lights in the
world), has no congestion control, and no security, but is expected to run
over the Internet.
According to you, this has nothing to do with the IETF. It might result in
the congestive collapse of the Internet, but who cares, the IETF doesn't do
street lights. I would like to see the criteria which determine that
telephones belong on the Internet but street lights don't!
Another problem with your formulation is that the Internet is a growing,
changing, entity, so "for the Internet" often means "for what I think the
Internet should be in a few years", and this is then a completely
unobjective criterion. One would hope instead that the IETF would want to
encourage competition between different views of Internet evolution, as the
competition of ideas is the way to make progress.
I also do not understand whether "for the Internet" means something different
than "for IP networking" or not.
I think it should also be part of the mission to produce standards that
facilitate the migration to IP of applications and infrastructures that use
legacy networking technologies. Such migration seems to be good for the
Internet, but I don't know if it is "for the Internet" or not.
-- www.simonwoodside.com :: www.openict.net :: www.semacode.org 99% Devil, 1% Angel
