A former IETF chair writes: > 'Adopt a draft' is not a formal step in the IETF standards process; it > isn't defined in either BCP 9 or BCP 25.
It's what BCP 78 refers to as "accept a Contribution as a working group document". > it's hard to formally appeal against a non-existent step in the process BCP 9 requires management to attempt to resolve disputes raised for any "Working Group recommendation". That covers _all_ recommendations, not just the ones mandated by BCPs such as BCP 9 or BCP 25. BCP 94---which updates RFC 2418, which is part of BCP 25---says that _all_ WG-chair decisions are "subject to appeal". A WG chair deciding that a WG has consensus to adopt is certainly a WG-chair decision. Furthermore, as part of claiming that IETF complies with antitrust law, https://web.archive.org/web/20250528213926/https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-llc-statement-competition-law-issues/ claims that IETF procedures have "robust appeal options" and that "Decision-making requires achieving broad consensus via these public processes." Again this isn't limited to specific types of decisions. The same document also claims that IETF procedural rules are "rigorously followed". Evidently this is not true: we see IETF management making up one excuse after another to do whatever it wants. Antitrust law requires "consensus" and an "appeals process" for SDOs: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2024-title15/html/USCODE-2024-title15-chap69-sec4301.htm Beyond the questions of policies and legality, think about how it _sounds_ for IETF management to say things like "We're declaring that this decision to adopt has consensus never mind all the people objecting and ha ha no you aren't allowed to appeal this until some later stage after IETF has invested more effort into this document". ---D. J. Bernstein P.S. For readers bumping into this message who haven't seen the context: Please see https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html to understand what's actually going on here. ===== NOTICES REGARDING IETF ===== It has come to my attention that IETF LLC believes that anyone filing a comment, objection, or appeal is engaging in a copyright giveaway by default, for example allowing IETF LLC to feed that material into AI systems for manipulation. Specifically, IETF LLC views any such material as a "Contribution", and believes that WG chairs, IESG, and other IETF LLC agents are free to modify the material "unless explicitly disallowed in the notices contained in a Contribution (in the form specified by the Legend Instructions)". I am hereby explicitly disallowing such modifications. Regarding "form", my understanding is that "Legend Instructions" currently refers to the portion of https://web.archive.org/web/20250306221446/https://trustee.ietf.org/wp-content/uploads/Corrected-TLP-5.0-legal-provsions.pdf saying that the situation that "the Contributor does not wish to allow modifications nor to allow publication as an RFC" must be expressed in the following form: "This document may not be modified, and derivative works of it may not be created, and it may not be published except as an Internet-Draft". That expression hereby applies to this message. I'm fine with redistribution of copies of this message. There are no confidentiality restrictions on this message. The issue here is with modifications, not with dissemination. For other people concerned about what IETF LLC is doing: Feel free to copy these notices into your own messages. If you're preparing text for an IETF standard, it's legitimate for IETF LLC to insist on being allowed to modify the text; but if you're just filing comments then there's no reason for this. _______________________________________________ TLS mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
