Subject: article on innovation and open standards

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 11:11:13 +0200

Just FYI that I wrote another article, this time on "permissionless innovation" and the role of open standards. We've talked about these topics earlier, but this has been on my mind recently - I've been traveling in recent weeks and talking about the roles of various organisations and styles of standards-making with many people. (Currently at the WTPF in Geneva…)

Here's the article:

http://www.ietf.org/blog/2013/05/permissionless-innovation/

Comments and thoughts appreciated, as always.

Jari

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 16:37:11 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
> 
> Just FYI that I wrote another article, this time on "permissionless
> innovation" and the role of open standards.

A nice summary!

    No permit had to be applied [for], no new network had to be built,
    and no commercial negotiation with other parties was needed when
    Facebook started, for instance.

And one consequence is, "No incumbent could value-price its services
so as to extract the added value created by Facebook."  But I don't
think that would be very popular at the ITU!

The critical difference is that the IETF is an organization of
*buyers* rather than an organization of *sellers*.

Dale

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From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 17:32:25 -0400

> *buyers* rather than an organization of *sellers*.

Without wishing to be nasty, I will point out that we have way more
vendors than operators participating in our standards development.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

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From: Mikael Abrahamsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:43 +0200 (CEST)

On Tue, 14 May 2013, Dale R. Worley wrote:

> The critical difference is that the IETF is an organization of *buyers* 
> rather than an organization of *sellers*.

Not that I have been active in the IETF that long (only a few years), but 
IETF is pretty vendor-heavy.

Otoh hand the whole point with IETF is that *nobody* is *excluded*, it 
consists of all interested parties and the barrier of entry is really low.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [email-masked]

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 02:26:21 -0400

> consists of all interested parties and the barrier of entry is really 
That's what many of us would like to believe.   But IETF certainly 
doesn't consist of all interested parties, and the barrier to effective 
participation (regularly showing up at meetings all over the world and 
spending significant time participating in mailing lists) can be 
prohibitively high.

Yes, I'm aware that some people (including myself) have effectively 
participated on occasion without doing either of the above.   But I 
think it's hard to effectively participate in IETF on a regular basis 
without a significant investment in both time and money.

Keith

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From: Mikael Abrahamsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 08:42:00 +0200 (CEST)

On Wed, 15 May 2013, Keith Moore wrote:

> participated on occasion without doing either of the above.  But I think 
> it's hard to effectively participate in IETF on a regular basis without 
> a significant investment in both time and money.

Personally I've only been on a single physical IETF meeting. I participate 
mainly via mailing lists.

And yes, it's hard to participate without spending (significant) time. I 
don't know how else this could be done though. It's at least my opinion 
that if time is made available, the barrier of entry is probably the 
lowest of any similar organisation I can think of.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 02:55:34 -0400

On 05/15/2013 02:42 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> Personally I've only been on a single physical IETF meeting. I 
> participate mainly via mailing lists.
>
> And yes, it's hard to participate without spending (significant) time. 
> I don't know how else this could be done though. It's at least my 
> opinion that if time is made available, the barrier of entry is 
> probably the lowest of any similar organisation I can think of.

I'd like to see WGs be more pro-active about periodically summarizing 
the salient points of their proposals, determining which parties outside 
of the WG are likely to be affected, explicitly soliciting input from 
those parties, and explicitly considering that input in their 
deliberations.   Some WGs do this, but for most WGs I don't think it 
happens often enough or formally/transparently enough.

Last Call shouldn't be the first time that we explicitly solicit 
feedback on proposals from interested parties outside the WG.

As far as I can tell, the primary reason that WGs are so resistant to 
IESG feedback is that too often the WGs have labored long and hard with 
little or no feedback from external sources, and they've reached 
consensus mostly by exhaustion.   By the time a document gets to IESG 
review and community-wide Last Call, the WG is usually too exhausted 
and/or too committed to that particular solution to fix any major 
flaws.   At this point there are often no good solutions - simple text 
changes and IESG notes are usually inadequate, and publishing the 
document in its current form may do more harm than good.   But if WGs 
got feedback from outside parties much earlier in the process, there's a 
much better chance that such problems could be fixed before the WG were 
exhausted and committed.

Of course anyone can send input to a WG's mailing list at any time. But 
someone who doesn't regularly follow the mailing list can have a 
difficult time understanding the state of things and knowing how and 
when to provide useful input.

Keith

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 12:57:05 +0300

> And yes, it's hard to participate without spending (significant) time. I don't know how else this could be done though. It's at least my opinion that if time is made available, the barrier of entry is probably the lowest of any similar organisation I can think of.

That is my experience as well, at least when talking about organisations that I think of as standards bodies. There are other forms of co-operation (just a set of interested people on a mailing list, for instance) where costs might be even lower. But it is hard for me to think there would not be at least some time spent, if you are making a comment on anything in any setting. You have to get somewhat familiar with the topic, you may have spent time finding out that there is a discussion that you want to participate in to begin with, you may have invested your own time in building something which made you an expert on the topic, etc. Anyway, I think relevance, timeliness, openness are probably higher up in my set of priorities for standards making than cost minimisation, except where costs are a barrier to the priorities higher up in priority.

But in any case, the point that Keith made about explicitly searching and soliciting for outsider's input is important. Well run standards efforts do this, and try to reach out to people who might care. Even if they have no time or possibility to attend IETFs or join mailing lists. We should probably try to do it even more than we are now. Sounds like a task for working group chairs.

Jari

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From: Thierry Moreau <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 09:01:24 -0400

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> Not that I have been active in the IETF that long (only a few years), 
> but IETF is pretty vendor-heavy.
> 

Some sections of the IETF would be more vendor-heavy, e.g. the routing 
area. In those sections, only a serious economic study might tell to 
which extent the "patent pool" (wikipedia is your friend) excludes the 
permissionless inventor in those IETF sections.

The DNS aspects pertaining to very high throughput nameservers appears 
vendor-heavy. I noticed some patents that are under the IETF IPR policy 
in this niche IT sector, and I am not aware of patent pools in this 
specific case.

> consists of all interested parties and the barrier of entry is really low.

Still in the DNS field, the lack of support of authoritative nameservers 
for "generic resource record type" would be a barrier to entry for 
permisionless innovation, maybe with a root cause linked to 
vendor-weight in a portion of the DNS field. Thus, permissionless 
invention occurs with the DNS TXT resource record type.

Let me insist that these two observations are hypotheses.

-- 
- Thierry Moreau

CONNOTECH Experts-conseils inc.
9130 Place de Montgolfier
Montreal, QC, Canada H2M 2A1

Tel. +1-514-385-5691

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From: Mikael Abrahamsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 16:00:41 +0200 (CEST)

> happens often enough or formally/transparently enough.

I agree. I'm also participating on nanog-l and other operator lists, and 
it's very rarely that a WG solicits feedback in those kinds of forums.

Question is, if larger feedback is requested, a lot of the time a larger 
feedback will be generated, and more work needed to go through this 
feedback and answer it.

End result might be better, but overall workload would be up, both in 
preparation phase and when feedback is coming in. I'm sure end result 
would probably be better, but more work would be needed, probably 
resulting in less technical work being done.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 10:14:41 -0400

On 05/15/2013 10:00 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>> the salient points of their proposals, determining which parties 
>> outside of the WG are likely to be affected, explicitly soliciting 
>> input from those parties, and explicitly considering that input in 
>> their deliberations.  Some WGs do this, but for most WGs I don't 
>> think it happens often enough or formally/transparently enough.
>
> I agree. I'm also participating on nanog-l and other operator lists, 
> and it's very rarely that a WG solicits feedback in those kinds of 
> forums.
>
> Question is, if larger feedback is requested, a lot of the time a 
> larger feedback will be generated, and more work needed to go through 
> this feedback and answer it.
>

We need to be careful about the tendency to measure IETF's output in 
terms of the number of RFCs produced.   I'd like to see IETF produce 
fewer (and sometimes shorter) RFCs of more relevance and higher 
technical quality, than we do now.

Keith

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 16:25:13 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Thierry Moreau <[email-masked]>
> 

My impression of the presentation is that it does not focus on
innovation that is part of, and extends, an existing technological
area, but rather innovation that uses existing technology as a
"platform" upon which to build new technology.  This sort of
innovation is less vulnerable to attack via patents, but it is
vulnerable to service providers that can differentially price the use
of the platform within the new application. 

Dale

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 16:25:32 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
> 

That is actually what I mean...  By "sellers" I mean "sellers of
telecommunications services".  The equipment vendors generally favor
the interests of the "buyers of telecommunications services", who are
their customers.

Dale

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 08:52:17 +0100

> vendors than operators participating in our standards development.

          Into the Future with the Internet Vendor Task Force
                        A very Curmudgeonly View
                                 or
               Testing Spaghetti - a Wall's Point of View

       as published in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
                   Volume 35, Number 5, October 2005

             http://archive.psg.com/051000.ccr-ivtf.html