Subject: IAB report to the community

From: IAB Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2019 11:00:03 -0700

Dear Colleagues,

Here is the IAB report for the period between IETF 104 and IETF 105.  If 
you have issues you want to discuss by email, feel free to send your 
comments to [email-masked] (our public discussion list) or 
[email-masked] (to reach just the IAB).  Questions at the open mic at IETF 
105 are, of course, also welcome.

The IAB has a few chartered roles. It confirms the appointments to the 
IESG, performs standards process oversight, and handles appeals. It also 
performs architectural oversight (including appointing the IRTF Chair), 
appoints the RFC series editor and oversight committee, manages the 
IETF's relationship with IANA, and handles liaisons and appointments 
both to ISOC and to other organizations. It also acts as an advisory 
body to the Internet Society.

Here's what the IAB has been doing since our last report; more detail on 
many of the topics is available at https://www.iab.org.

Appeals

There were no appeals during this period.

Appointments

As part of its appointments role, the IAB re-appointed Russ Housley and 
Barry Leiba to the Community Coordination Group for the 2019-2021 term.  
In addition, the position of Internet Society Trustee filled between 
IETF 103 and 104 is now public: Richard Barnes will serve a second term 
on the ISOC board.  The IAB is also currently seeking community feedback 
for the IETF Delegate to the ICANN 2020 NomCom 
<https://www.iab.org/2019/07/09/iab-seeks-feedback-on-candidates-for-icann-nomcom-2/>.  
The IAB anticipates completing the appointment to the ICANN RZERC during 
IETF 105.

Documents

You can always find the documents the IAB has adopted and is working on 
athttps://datatracker.ietf.org/stream/iab.

The two documents noted as approved for publication in the last report 
have now been issued as RFC 8546 
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8546>and RFC 8558 
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8558>.  The IAB has also adopted four 
internet-drafts:

  *

    Fifty Years of RFCs
    <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-fiftyyears/>

  *

    The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness Principle
    <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance/>

  *

    Principles for Operation of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
    (IANA) Registries
    <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-rfc7500-bis/>

  *

    Long-term Viability of Protocol Extension Mechanisms
    <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-use-it-or-lose-it-04>

The IAB provided comments 
<https://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence-reports-documents/2019-2/comments-on-evolving-the-governance-of-the-root-server-system/>on 
theICANN Public Comment on Evolving the Governance of the Root Server 
System 
<https://www.icann.org/public-comments/rss-governance-2019-05-23-en>.  
As part of those comments the IAB agreed that if the governance model is 
approved it will:

  *

    Appoint two representatives to the Governance Working Group

  *

    Review the work of the Governance Working Group.

  *

    Coordinate with the Root Server System Governance Board

  *

    Appoint a member of Root Server System Standing Committee.

Working with RIPE NCC and the ITU study group 2, the IAB also provided 
updated instructions on revised operating instructions for E164.arpa 
<https://www.iab.org/2019/05/02/revised-operating-instructions-for-e164-arpa-enum/>.

Programs

The IAB organizes its long-term work, for the most part, into programs. 
There are basically two classes: management programs and architectural 
programs.  The former are how we handle the oversight of various things, 
and the latter are where we do architectural work.  The former are 
expected to last as long as the IAB continues to have that oversight 
function; the latter last until the IAB has come to a conclusion on the 
relevant group of topics or has decided that the topic needs to be 
reframed.  Programs are listed at 
https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/. As a general rule, each 
architectural program has a public mailing list, as well as a 
member-specific list.  For subscription instructions, see 
https://www.iab.org/iab-mailing-lists/.

Both the StackEvo 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/ip-stack-evolution-program/>and 
PrivSec 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/privacy-and-security-program/>programs 
have been operating for a number of years and have fulfilled their 
initial goals.  Each was the evolution of previous groups (the IP 
evolution program 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/concluded-programs/ip-evolution/>and 
the Privacy 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/concluded-programs/privacy-program/>and 
Security 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/concluded-programs/security/>programs, 
respectively).  While work in related areas will no doubt continue, the 
IAB plans to conclude both groups in the near future and to carry out 
any future work in other programs or structures.

As part of their duties under RFC 6635, the RFC Series Oversight 
Committee (RSOC) program reviewed the RSE contract in May of this year. 
   After that review, they notified Heather Flanagan, the current RSE, 
that they would recommend the contract be extended for two years and 
noted an intent to prepare a Request for Proposals during that two year 
period in order to address some concerns that were raised about response 
rates after the last bid process.  Shortly after this, the RSE notified 
the IAB, the IETF LLC Board, and RSOC that she did not intend to renew 
the contract. More details 
<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/_Le5BN-GsJA-424DHbcFupgZHAA>on 
both that timeline and the process for issuing a future SOW were posted 
to the IETF list in early July.

The RSOC and the IAB are keenly aware, however, of the ongoing community 
discussion around this process.  As part of that, there is time-critical 
decision to make of whether to issue an RFP to recruit a new RSE among 
whose duties will be the facilitation of that discussion or to hold the 
RFP in abeyance until community discussion on substantive changes to the 
RFC Editor model documents has concluded. In order to facilitate 
discussion, the IAB has requested that Olaf Kolkman present a short 
review of the current model during the administrative plenary at IETF 
105.  We then hope to use a portion of the IAB open mic time to solicit 
discussion of whether an RFP should go forward now or after community 
discussion completes. The RSOC has in parallel issued a draft SOW based 
on the previously issued SOW for community comments, so that it will be 
able to move quickly along that path should it be the community preference.

Workshops

During this period the IAB held a workshop, Design Expectations vs. 
Deployment Realities 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-workshop/>(DEDR), in 
Helsinki Finland over June 4-5, 2019, hosted by Nokia.  A formal 
workshop report is still in preparation, but the IAB anticipates the 
work to continue along several lines.   Among them is a consideration of 
the architectural changes implied in functionality moving up the stack. 
As that change has occurred, the impact of centralization and 
consolidation has become more pronounced, threat models have shifted, 
and the locus of user action has changed.  Documenting and evaluating 
those changes will be one focus of future work.

In recent years, a number of proprietary formats have been defined to 
enable aggregators of news and other articles to republish Web 
resources; for example, Google’sAMP <https://www.ampproject.org>, 
Facebook’sInstant Articles <https://instantarticles.fb.com>, Baidu’sMIP 
<https://github.com/mipengine/mip>, and Apple’sNews Format 
<https://developer.apple.com/news-publisher/>.This week the IAB is 
holding a workshop, Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and 
the Publisher Ecosystem 
<https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/escape-workshop/>(ESCAPE), to 
look at the interaction between large content distributors and 
publishers on the web and especially at how changes in the technical 
capabilities of the web might affect the relationship between them. 
Important in this space aresigned exchanges 
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses/?include_text=1>andweb 
packages 
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yasskin-wpack-bundled-exchanges/?include_text=1>created 
by bundling these exchanges.  The workshop participants will be 
discussing Web Packaging and other options in the space of web content 
distribution with a particular emphasis on the secondary effects of 
those mechanisms.

Internet Society

A number of members of the IAB participated in the Internet Society’s 
workshop updating its description of the Internet Invariants.  The IAB 
has also been consulting with ISOC on its Consolidation activity, raised 
in the Global Internet Report 2019 
<https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/>.  The IAB provided feedback 
on the ISOC call for papers and funding.  Carl Gahnberg and Konstantinos 
Komaitis also participated in the DEDR workshop, focused on this trend 
in deployments.

Respectfully submitted,

Ted Hardie

for the IAB