From: an366601@anon.penet.fi (** CRAM **)
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Reply-To: an366601@anon.penet.fi
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 16:38:03 UTC
Subject: hotwired: anarchy of IETF
HOW ANARCHY WORKS
On location with the masters of the metaverse, the Internet
Engineering Task Force.
By Paulina Borsook
_________________________________________________________________
The Internet, perhaps the greatest instantiation of self-organization
the planet has ever seen, evolves in its fractious decentralized way
through the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF. Which means, in
the cyber '90s, that the True Masters of the Universe are not
freemasons, mergers-and-acquisitions specialists, or venture
capitalists but the members of a voluntary association of tech wizards
that create and oversee the technological future of the Internet. It
is the IETF's work on tough technical problems that will make possible
the whiz-bang Net applications of the future.
Maintaining a low profile and peaceably going about its business as
collections of True Masters always do, the IETF has always consisted
of anyone (that's right, anyone - an IETFer could be your mom, a
former Soviet commissar of culture, or even a director of marketing)
who wants to be part of the technical working groups charged with
creating the standards and pathways that will move the Net into the
next century. All you have to do is pay a token registration fee and
sign up. No questions asked, no meritocratic credentials checked.
In the IETF, there's a kind of direct, populist democracy that most of
us have never experienced: Not in democratically elected government,
where too many layers of pols and polls and image and handling
intervene. Not in radical politics, where too often, the same old
alpha-male/top-dog politics prevail despite the countercultural
objectives pursued. And not in the feminist collective world, where so
much time is spent establishing total consensus and dealing with the
concerns of process queens that little gets done. The IETF provides a
counter-example of true grass-roots political process that few of us
have ever had the privilege to participate in, outside of the
backstories about member planets of the Star Trek Federation. IETF
group process succeeds because of a profound connection with, and
understanding of, the real world of networking.
Unlike most technical-standards bodies, the IETF has pioneered a
culture of pragmatism (quit jawing, throw it out on the Net and see if
it works). It maintains a high debate-to-politicking ratio: there may
be 104 opinions in a room of 100 IETFers, but the work still gets
done. Which is not to say IETFers have the finesse and indirection of
19th-century French diplomats: one IETFer, trying to avoid pissing
matches over an issue, was heard saying, "I don't think urinary
contests will solve anything"; and another, regarding the
organization's expectations, "If you don't write well, there are lots
of standards groups in Europe that would love to have you."
MIT professor Dave Clark, one of the grand old men of the Internet,
may have unintentionally written the IETF anthem in his A Cloudy
Crystal Ball/Apocalypse Now presentation at the 24th annual July 1992
IETF conference. Today, it's immortalized on T-shirts: "We reject:
kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and
running code." Which might translate to, "In the IETF, we don't allow
caucusing, lobbying, and charismatic leaders to chart our path, but
when something out on the Net really seems to work and makes sense to
most of us, that's the path we'll adopt."
Part of what has made the Net successful is precisely that: it works,
and because it works, Net standards and protocols have dominated the
marketplace, where others have tried and failed. In fact, the IETF
style of technology creation is being adopted by other
standards-making bodies such as the ATM forum. (Asynchronous Transfer
Mode is a technology to support very-high-speed networks.) The IETF's
political culture is hardy enough so that the Net mechanisms and
structures it has fostered may very well enable the Net to survive in
good enough shape through the next millennium. Never mind that Net
hardware and software infrastructures struggle with a now-huge
embedded base that makes technological innovation difficult. Never
mind that Net culture hasn't sorted out what to do with the shock of
commercialization. Never mind that the IETF has evolved from a small
group of élite geeks to a massive group of more average folks, a
change on many axes that necessitates incremental growth.
What it is
The Internet, and its ancestor, the Arpanet, has always had its
standards-creation bodies. But back in the early days, the Net was a
research project known to fewer than a hundred guys - and pretty much
everyone who used the network was also involved in creating it,
experimenting with it, and evolving it. In effect, the IETF, the
anarchic assembly of the Net designers and standards bearers, and its
Arpanet precursor Network Working Group, more or less were the Net.
But today, the Net has evolved to include millions, and attendance at
IETF meetings has surpassed 1,000 - though some longtime IETFers would
insist that, for the most part, it's a small core of about 100 people,
predominantly old-timers, who are still getting the work done.
Most IETF work is done over e-mail between meetings, using Net
dist-list servers. But its pioneers, ever smart and sensible, knew
that people must occasionally meet face to face, that the bandwidth of
real-time conversation can make issues-resolution a hell of a lot more
efficient, and that sometimes the most important work that humans do
happens in that most fertile, inadvertent, and self-organizing
fashion: over dinner, in the hallways, late at night over drinks. In
fact, attending a bar BOF can be the best part of an IETF meeting. BOF
stands for Birds of Feather - a temporary, informal, charterless group
- and bar BOF is a joke term for night meetings that continue in the
bar of the hotel after the official night meetings end. IETF sessions
officially run from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., and the night sessions,
which run from 7:30 to 10 p.m., frequently never end - they merely
transfer to the bar. Alas, for the hoteliers, this is not a crowd of
heavy drinkers: Pepsi, Coke, and beer are the norm. Bar BOFs are no
less technical than scheduled technical sessions - and may be more so,
since they are often made up of a selected crew who talk in a
shorthand that would stall out the full membership of a working group.
So, the IETF meets face to face three times a year, twice in the US,
in deference to the Net's historic roots and to the preponderance of
network researchers located there; once outside the US, in deference
to the Net's global nature.
True identity of the IETF
The best of the IETFers are folks you'd want to have with you after
the nuclear holocaust the Net was originally funded to survive:
well-intentioned, clear-headed, results-oriented, communicative (these
are communications geeks, after all) - and community-minded. And in a
case of life imitating art, playing Nuclear War, a card game invented
by a Mensan, is an honored late-night IETF tradition. With great
silliness and little evidence of testosterone poisoning, players try
to wipe out their opponents' populations.
IETFers are something like a dominant strain of descendants of those
kindly, NASA-Mission-Control guys of the 1960s with some recessive
streaks of '90s cypherpunks thrown in. Most are comfy, slightly dumpy
white guys in the 35-to-50-plus demographic, with nary a great haircut
in sight. The women (and there are women, both at the executive and
rank-and-file levels, in roughly the same proportion as on the Net: 10
percent) run to the mode of pleasant post-graduate: jeans, blazers,
blunt-cut long hair.
But even if meetings of IETFers look like a conference of
municipal-sanitation planners - minus the suits that would amuse
members - the IETF nonetheless constitutes a radical social
phenomenon. Not the least of which is that while the IETF is peopled
by folks rightfully sure of their opinions on networking, IETF
mechanisms prevent any great men and women of history from taking over
the process through personal magnetism. With that many
techno-smarty-pants in a group, everyone is paranoid about cabals and
back-room deals. So, while IETFers become known for their eccentricity
or obnoxiousness or offbeat brilliance or plodding attention to
detail, a cult of personality - where personal allure can drive policy
- doesn't žourish. In fact, most of the IETFers don't particularly
want to be singled out as spokespeople - not because any harm would
come to them for going public with opinions, but because they simply
resist the notion of IETF representatives to begin with.
A little over a third of the attendees at each IETF meeting are new;
about a third of those go on to become regular attendees. In typical
IETF communitarian spirit, first-timers are treated to a voluntary
45-minute orientation, told who to seek out for help and how to govern
themselves so the process works - and then are subjected to benign
neglect. No outward stigma is attached to being a newbie.
And it doesn't necessarily take long for old-school IETFers to see
newcomers as respected colleagues - if the newcomers can establish
their authority in the short initial grace period that longtime
IETFers extend off the bat, or if, over the course of an IETF
meeting's five days, newbie arguments start making sense. And this can
lead to one of the best parts of attending an IETF meeting: getting on
first-name terms with Net luminaries.
IETF culture
When people collaborate on a daily basis, they generally use first
names. IETFers see each other only a few times a year, yet the group,
which started as a small community of know-it-alls who all knew each
other, retains its insular village intimacy: it still sorta feels like
everyone is working together at close quarters. It's just assumed when
you hear talk of Lixia (Zhang, of Xerox Parc) or Joyce (Reynolds, of
the University of Southern California) or Van (Jacobson, of the
University of California, Berkeley) or Dan (Lynch, of Interop +
CyberCash), you know who's being referred to.
More important, there's the assumption that we're all in this cozy, if
contentious, intentional community (or is it a graduate seminar?)
together, so anything other than first names (especially honorifics
such as "Dr." or "Ms.") would be pretentious and out of line. If
you've acquitted yourself in an IETF working group with useful or at
least witty contributions ("I'm terribly sorry, but I don't know what
reality you walked in from"), you too can become known by your first
name, alongside Stev (Knowles, of FTP Software) or Lyman (Chapin, of
Bolt Beranek and Newman).
And one of the collateral benefits of attending an IETF meeting
consists of hanging out with super-sharp, good-natured, friendly geeks
whose affectionate term of false mockery and true praise is
name-calling someone "Engineer!" If you're lucky, you might end up
involved in a dinner confab with the likes of Noel Chiappa. Chiappa, a
colleague of Dave Clark and the inventor of the multiprotocol router,
is part of a mailing list of about 30 people who routinely bark at
each other about the meaning of life, the events of the day, and
esoterica such as the roots of the Peloponnesian War.
What's so IETF-like about this mailing-list/debating society is the
number of Net GSGs (Genuinely Smart Guys/Gals) who subscribe to it.
And even though formal education (some have PhDs, some dropped out of
college), religion (some are fundamentalist Christian, some have lived
in monasteries in Japan and India), geography (some live all over
North America, some in other hemispheres), and politics (some consider
themselves far to the right of Newt, some consider themselves
tree-huggers of the first order) vary wildly, good manners prevail
while arguments rage. Typical of the mailing list's
fierce-but-friendly style is the ongoing debate between its
creationists and its Darwinians, a bit like a match of the World
Wrestling Federation - much shouting and posturing, much goodwill. And
no one gets hurt.
How it works
The IETF is divided into nine functional areas that change as needed.
Each has at least one area director (a volunteer like everyone else in
the IETF); and these directors comprise the Internet Engineering
Steering Group, responsible for Internet standards processes ("A
weekend is when you get up, put on comfortable clothes, and go into
work to do your Steering Group work"). About a dozen working groups in
each area operate under charters to achieve specific goals - such as
creating a protocol to retrieve a file - and when those goals are
achieved, the working group dissolves. The teams create informational
documents, protocol standards, or resolutions to Internet problems.
That there are pretty much no permanent working groups is one of the
many clever embedded IETF safeguards that encourage action and
currency, and discourage bureaucracy and the March-of-Dimes syndrome
of a permanent shadow government. (What does an organization do, once
its goal - elimination of polio - is achieved? To ensure its survival,
it gets into something else - like birth defects!)
Similarly, the creation of new working groups and areas is generally
avoided: since all IETF work is carried on by volunteers with other
day jobs, there is relatively little incentive toward turf-building
and make-work exercises. Few IETFers have the time or interest to
devote themselves to technical tasks someone is carrying on elsewhere
in the IETF - although dissenters may form alternative working groups
if they feel a bad solution was picked, or if progress isn't being
made fast enough.
In practice, this means that the working groups take on such noble
efforts as helping the Net survive its catastrophically high growth
rates; coaxing it to work with new multimedia, video, and multicast
technologies like the MBone and CU-SeeMe; and getting it to connect
more effectively with IBM mainframe-legacy networks. In the midst of
confusion and greed over intellectual property, the IETF, an
institution that has been predicated on making its intellectual
property freely available, is also grappling with marketplace
realities. Working groups even seek to foster civility on the Net: the
charter of the working group abbreviated RUN (Responsible Use of the
Network) is to codify and update a useful Netiquette RFC.
RFC stands for "Request For Comments," a term that extends back to the
1970s Arpanet Network Working Group. An RFC represents collated
proposals suf-ficiently polished to be worthy of eliciting formal
responses and technical experimentation from the Net community. Some
RFCs are serious technical documents, some are jokes, and some are in
between. In October 1993, for example, Gary Malkin authored the
helpful RFC 1539 titled "The Tao of the IETF: A Guide for New
Attendees of the Internet Engineering Task Force," in which he jokes,
"It's unwise to get between a hungry IETFer (and there is no other
kind) and coffee-break brownies and cookies, no matter how interesting
a hallway conversation is."
Institutional affiliations
The institution that serves as the IETF's personal assistant is the
CNRI - Corporation for National Research Initiatives - a permanent
body that takes care of the details. Located in Reston, Virginia, CNRI
was founded in part by the man People magazine called one of 25 most
intriguing individuals of 1994 - Vinton Cerf - the Net celeb and
father of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol).
Its charter is "Research and Development for the National Information
Infrastructure," and it's largely funded by federal grants.
Make no mistake: the IETF is big government with a human face.
Probably only half of the expenses of bare-bones IETF attendance
(breakfast snacks to gnaw on, refreshments between sessions, hotel
meeting-room rentals, signage, CNRI staff time, copies of IETF
proceedings) are covered by the registration fee - US$130 at the 31st
IETF. Someone, mainly the government in the guise of the National
Science Foundation, is its invisible benefactor. IETF meetings are
explicitly not trade shows, but in addition to government funding,
local sponsors, whether universities or corporations, do provide
additional support at each meeting.
IETFers speak, half with amusement and half in horror, about the time
a bunch of suits infiltrated an IETF meeting. Speculation goes that
the suits, fired up by the odor of money and power being given off by
information superhighway hype, thought to get insider information -
and what they got instead, of course, was progress on a bunch of
esoteric technical standards (like the minutiae of routing tables) and
philosophical debates (the technical merits of different kinds of
pricing schemes) that would in no way help anyone productize anything.
More sinisterly, veteran IETFers think the onetime infestation by
suits may have been an attempt to pack working groups with members
from the suits' own companies. This way, the suits' specific corporate
interests might have been best (over)represented. Of course, the whole
scheme would have been an exercise in futility since the IETF doesn't
operate by vote. This meeting-packing stunt is a time-honored tactic
for all standards organizations; but alas, it can't work at the IETF,
where people have keen bullshit detectors, long institutional memories
for what has and hasn't worked in both the procedural and
technological past, and a stubborn insistence on trying to choose the
best technological solution, as determined by real-world data, not by
corporate realpolitik.
Here there's no voting, no chance that a proposal with a weak mandate
of 51-for/49-against will be called the best solution. Even at what
seems like an impossible stalemate, IETFers will look to graceful
principles to arrive at a resolution; diversity of opinion might be
resolved by an agreement to make some decisions, for instance, in the
belief that "agreement about parts may lead to agreement about
wholes," says IETFer Dave Crocker.
Exception reports
The political culture of rough consensus and running code is
imperfect, of course, as any human endeavor has to be, and it's being
stressed in the IETF as the Net grows beyond what its creators could
ever have imagined. Area directors gripe that too much time in working
group sessions is spent educating rubes who show up unprepared, having
failed to read the documents readily available online and having
neglected to educate themselves about technical decisions made in the
past. Some area directors complain that certain working groups have
gotten so large they make the IETF process untenable. And the working
group process has always had problems with Net geniuses (who may have
solutions so far-reaching and oblique no one knows what to make of
them) and Net morons (who can be obstructionist at best, failing to
operate at the level of abstraction of their colleagues).
As human artifact, the IETF can't make everyone perfectly happy all of
the time. In 1992, a palace putsch was ignited by a committee meeting
at the International Internet User's convention in Kobe, Japan, which
spread to the IETF meeting the next month in Boston. Longtime IETF
leaders were thrown or rotated out within the year, guilty of
appearing to be too mandarin, too out-of-touch, too long in power -
and possibly guilty of using the IETF to pursue private research goals
instead of the common good.
A self-selecting, self-perpetuating old-Net-boys group was replaced by
a more democratic nominating committee, but with a classic IETF twist:
members of the nominating committee are selected at random from
eligible members who are willing to serve. Again, there's the IETF
populist assumption that all citizens are equally able to make
important decisions - personnel ones in this case - and the process
has worked quite well.
Meanwhile, typical of the spirit of comity that defines the
organization, the ousted Net prophets didn't lose their honor in their
own country, and now, three years later, a post-Kobe backlash may be
in the offing, with more and more IETFers recognizing that the
organization needs continuity and historical perspective. A couple
years later, a number of IETF's gray heads have resurfaced in
positions of semiformal stewardship.
A grand melodrama also surrounds the future of IP (Internet Protocol),
the communications technology that undergirds the Net and is becoming
too old and creaky to support all that is being demanded of it (see
"Addressing the Future of the Net," Wired 3.05). Even though certain
IETF political wounds are still being licked vis-ą-vis the 1994
decisions that were made about the next generation of IP, the reality
is, as always with the IETF, that if some rebel fighters were to come
up with a demonstrably better solution, chances are it would have a
hearing and be tested.
Some say the problems with IP can be fixed only when they are free of
the homogenizing effects of the IETF; because of its size, the
argument goes, only the lowest common denominator of network thinking
takes place at the IETF. These dissenters may end up ignoring the
mainstream IETF work on the next generation of IP - and strategize a
better IP in skunkworks alternative working groups. But in the
elastic, anarchic structure of the IETF, there's room for such
alternatives, dissent, and working-around.
All told, in spite of these breaches within the community, the IETF,
for the most part, is still doing just fine. It's what's going on in
the world outside that causes alarm among IETFers.
The price of celebrity
IETFers are realists, perhaps from their experience of dealing with
the true nature of networking: IRL problems in electronic plumbing and
žow control, injected with an ornery degree of chaos. IETFers know
they have to worry about new users, dumb users, and commercial users,
since what has an impact on one part of the Net inevitably has
consequences on another. (Consider it another example of the
butteržy-over-China effect.) And IETFers know the Net is caught in the
middle of a fatal embrace between the Godzilla of Microsoft and the
smog monster of the Regional Bell Operating Companies - with the
Terminator of local and national government intervention hovering
nearby. Commercial enterprises, government forces, and
telecommunications providers are concerning themselves with the Net as
they never have before - and in doing so, may screw up one of the most
beautifully self-regulating, self-healing, adaptive, democratic,
neural networks of people and technology the world has ever seen. As
one IETFer put it, "A government interested in using us is a
government interested in how we work." In other words, once
governments realize what a treasure there is in the Net, they want to
mess with it, regulate it, and censor it. The Exon bill may be coming
to a country near you!
Some of the best thinkers in the IETF believe the greatest hope for
the relative freedom and independence of the Net lies in a kind of
self-canceling effect that may result from the interplay of these new
outside threats. Could be. And wouldn't it be pretty to think so?
But the IETF is not into denial. Savvy IETFers have intuited since the
mid-1980s that their treasure was too wondrous a thing not to have
commercial potential, and keynote speakers have addressed various
commercial aspects of the Net over the last several years. At the 31st
IETF, for instance, Nathaniel Borenstein - one of the brains behind
Carnegie Mellon University's pioneering Andrew electronic-mail
network, the Internet MIME standard for multimedia e-mail, and First
Virtual Holdings, a force for Net commercial transactions - focused on
the technical aspects of the start-up's offering. That an agent of
merchandising was addressing an IETF plenary meeting was as much a
signal of change as the first New Yorker cartoon about the Internet.
Markets and money are coming to matter to the IETF and the Internet as
much as protocol suites and internetworking schemas.
The IETF, in the mid-1990s, struggles with the intersection of
technology and culture. And the organization necessarily works less
well, because culture and policy and economics are far less amenable
to the logic of running code. Nonetheless, echoing what Winston
Churchill said about democracy - "It is the worst form of Government
except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to
time" - the political economy of the IETF is so precious, for what it
has done and for what it continues to try to do, that we must all hope
it lasts and lasts.
San Francisco writer Paulina Borsook (loris@well.sf.ca.us) wrote
about female technopagans in Wired 3.07. She has been an Internet
camp follower since attending the first Interop in 1987. Noel Chiappa
wants it pointed out that Borsook also wrote the novella "Love over
the Wires," which appeared in Wired 1.04.
Copyright © 1995 Wired Ventures Ltd.
Compilation copyright © 1995 HotWired Ventures LLC
All rights reserved.
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