[discuss] Comcast undertakes 9 year IETF cosponsorship!?

Sun Mar 23 00:56:57 UTC 2014

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One clarification...

On 03/23/2014 12:22 AM, David Conrad wrote:
> 
> The question of whether or not members of "the Board" can
> influence those standards is slightly different. Again,
> over-simplifying a lot, IETF standards must be approved by the IESG
> which is made up of the Area Directors. For sake of argument, one
> could posit a scenario where an evil company could capture some or
> all of the IESG (challenging as it would require compromising the
> Nomcom process or buying off AD members).

Buying off would be required, since for the IESG, nomcom generally
limit one organisation to 2 ADs. There are exceptions when there
are 3 IESG members from the same orgnaisation. There are 15 area
directors who currently make up the IESG.

For Michael's benefit: all the nomcom details can be found, as
usual, in RFCs, with some surrounding text at [1]. Not enthralling
reading to be sure, but if you do read those RFCs you'll get a
good feel for that part of the IETF. And recall that all those
RFCs have been through the usual IETF consensus process.

> However the only impact this would have in standards setting would
> be to delay/block the publication of a document as an RFC. In most
> cases, this would be unlikely to impact the setting of standards
> since folks interested in the standard would probably just go an
> implement the Internet Draft (the pre-RFC document) produced by the
> working group. The blockage would also be public and obvious. It is
> also unrelated to sponsorship.

Well, an AD can also propose a new WG on a topic but needs to
get the rest of the IESG to agree. There are bits and pieces
of AD influence that are not solely related to delaying stuff.
But the steering part of being an AD requires people who want
to be steered, an AD can't really push against the tide.

> As Stephen said, "you're barking up the wrong tree."

Very much so.

Cheers,
S.

[]1 https://www.ietf.org/nomcom/
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