The IETF, despite the fact that it keeps the Internet running, doesn’t get much news coverage. I suspect that’s partly because its structure is pretty well 100% opaque and incomprehensible to outsiders (and it seems to not a few insiders, especially newbies like me). There’s actually no such organization as the IETF but there are (in alphabetical order) CNRI (who run the Secretariat) and Foretec and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and the Internet Research Task Force and the Internet Society (ISOC) and the RFC Editor. Anyhow, there’s news. Big news, I think. Most of it I don’t understand and the parts that I do I may have been told in confidence. The fairly severe angst coming out of this spilled over into the Jabber channels from Thursday night’s plenary session. I think it may be as smooth and simple as the IETF trying to do the same thing more efficiently, or it could be a lot more complicated and ugly. Don’t ask me to explain it; but I think it matters.
