Skip to main content
  • IETF 121 post-meeting survey

    IETF 121 Dublin was held 2-8 November 2024 and the results of the post-meeting survey are now available on a web-based interactive dashboard.

    25 Nov 2024
  • The new GREEN working group gets ready for an energy efficient Internet

    The Getting Ready for Energy-Efficient Networking (GREEN) working group will explore use cases, derive requirements, and provide solutions to optimize energy efficiency across the Internet.

    29 Oct 2024
  • IETF Annual Report 2023

    The IETF Annual Report 2023 provides a summary of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and RFC Editor community activities from last year.

    25 Oct 2024
  • IETF 122 Bangkok registration open

    Registration is now available for the IETF 122 Bangkok meeting scheduled for 15-21 March 2025, which is the first time registration for an IETF meeting has been open before the preceding meeting registration has closed.

    25 Oct 2024
  • First Impressions from the IAB AI-CONTROL workshop

    The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) organized a workshop on 19-20 September 2024 to discuss issues around and possibilities for practical mechanisms that publishers of data on the Internet could employ to opt out of use by the Large Language Models and other machine learning techniques used for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

    24 Oct 2024

Filter by topic and date

Filter by topic and date

ENAME Workshop

17 Oct 2017

A highly interactive workshop organized by the Internet Architecture Board raises important issues and generates ideas for significant follow-on work.

Flag of Vancouver
Flag of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The IAB held a workshop on Explicit Internet Naming Systems last week in Vancouver, B.C., and there are a couple of interesting early conclusions to draw. The first conclusion is actually about the form of the workshop, which was an experiment by the IAB. While many of our workshops run like mini conferences, with paper presentations and follow-on questions, this workshop was structured as a retreat. There was a relatively small number of participants gathered around a common table space, with sessions organized as joint discussions around specific topics. Moderators kept the conversations on topic, and discussants kept it moving forward if it lagged.

The result was one of the most interactive workshops I’ve attended. While we did have to run a queue in most sessions (and the queues could get a bit long), the conversations had real give-and-take, more like an IETF hallway discussion than a series of mic line comments.

While I don’t expect that this style would be appropriate for all our workshops, it’s useful to know that this retreat style can work. I suspect we would use it again in other situations where the IAB is trying to step back from the current framing of an issue and synthesize a set of new approaches.

A second early conclusion is that the IAB was right in suspecting that its previous framing of the issues around Internet naming and internationalization wasn’t quite right. Among other things, that framing had us trying to push human interface considerations up the stack and away from the protocol mechanics that worked on what we saw as identifiers. One clear conclusion from this workshop was that the choice of identifier structure and protocol mechanics will constrain the set of possible human interfaces. When those constraints don’t match the needs of the human users, the resulting friction generates a lot of heat (and not much light). One suggestion for follow on work from the workshop will be to document the user interface considerations that arise from using different types of identifiers, so that new systems can recognize more easily the consequences of the identifier types they choose.

An additional point that came up multiple times was the role of implicit context in transforming references in speech or writing into identifiers that drive specific protocol mechanics. While the shorthand for this is “the side of the bus” problem, the space is much larger and includes heuristic search systems ranging from the educated guess through to highly personalized algorithmic responses. The participants saw a couple of possible ways in which standards developed in this area might advance how these tuples of context elements and references can be safely used to mint or manage identifiers. A first step in that will be to suggest that the IAB look at language tags, network provider identifiers, and similar common representations of context to see how they function across protocols. Follow on work from that might include developing common vocabularies, serialization formats, and privacy models.

Like many others, I came away from the workshop with the realization that there is a dauntingly large amount of work to be done in this space. The workshop will be recommending more than a half dozen follow-on pieces of work to the IAB, as well as a potential research group and some individual drafts. Despite the amount of work facing us, I and many other participants left the room more hopeful that we came in, both that we can make progress and that some of the tools we need are already available. 

If you’d like to join in the conversation, you can share your comments on Internet naming by email to architecture-discuss@ietf.org or directly with the IAB at iab@iab.org.


Share this page