putting vendors' feet to the fire

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

> The stuff being spewed out here by some people indicates an ignorance
> of how standards work in the IETF.

Not necessarily apropos of the rest of that message, but whenever
people say "we don't do things that way in IETF", I wonder if they're
assuming that IETF should not, or cannot, change - even if change
is needed.

Of course, there are limits to what a volunteer organization can do,
and we need to respect those limits.  We can't solve every problem 
that the Internet has, nor even every technical problem that the Internet
has.

I think it's fair to observe that failure of vendors to conform to 
standards has caused numerous problems with Internet operations, 
interoperability of Internet applications, and the ability of the 
Internet to support new applications.  Vendors make implementation 
errors, and vendors sometimes deliberately violate specifications 
if/when they believe it will give them a competitive advantage.  The 
vast majority of customers are not able to evaluate vendors' products 
for standards conformance, and once the investment has been made in 
a particular vendor's hardware/software it is often too late to change. 
In a network where there are 100s of millions of computers, and everyone's 
computer can potentially interact with everyone else's computer, and
failure of any single computer to "behave" can wreak havoc - putting the 
burden on the customer to "do the right thing" simply doesn't scale.

I don't claim to know the answer, or whether it is at all within IETF's 
power to do this.  But the Internet community desperately needs some 
mechanism to hold vendors accountable when they deploy products that do harm.

Keith