[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[Christian Huitema]

> From: Joe Touch [mailto:touch at ISI.EDU]
> Christian Huitema wrote:
> >> Christian Huitema wrote:
> >>>>> Has the IETF become the protocol police?
> >>>> The IETF has not; members of the IETF have taken the task on,
> >> though.
> >>> Well, who made you king?
> >> One question is whether they were enabled to deliberately explore an
> >> experimental protocol in a widely-deployed public distribution, or
> >> whether they were enabled without that understanding.
> >
> > But who decides whether a protocol is experimental, or good enough
> for production use?
>
> That's supposed to happen in the IETF. The protocol in question is
> being purported as experimental, not optional standards-track.

But that means that the IETF would in practice be the judge of what can be deployed in the Internet. It could simply withdraw its stamp of approval and that the product would then, in theory, never be deployed. What if the developers are convinced that their spec is good, and the IETF is just being slow? Do you really expect that whoever needs the product will just wait forever?

-- Christian Huitema