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

[Joe Touch]

Christian Huitema wrote:
>> 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.

In this case, it means that the people who came up with CUBIC consider
it experimental. It's not like the IETF stamped that on *their* Internet
Draft.

You raise interesting questions in the general case, and yes, it's the
standards community that defines the standards. Who else would?

> 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?

There are plenty of protocols that never went through the IETF, or went
through as Informational because they didn't *ask* to be standardized.
Again, that's an interesting academic question, but not relevant to
protocols that actually ask to be experimental by the developers.

Joe

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 250 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/attachments/20080104/a0844fde/signature-0001.bin