Welcome to IETF 89!

It is a great place to have an IETF, with a lot of technology businesses and academia in the city and the rest of the country. London is also obviously an overall interesting city, easy to travel to, and has a lot of restaurants and pubs for those side meetings and unofficial gatherings that often drive a lot of the new ideas coming to the IETF.

I am very pleased that our host in London is ICANN. And our partnership with ICANN runs deeper than hosting this meeting. Steve Crocker, chairman of the board at ICANN wrote a nice article about the IETF and the relationship of the two organisations. ICANN is a consumer of the technology that we produce at the IETF, and we often work on projects together, such as on the next-generation whois technology. ICANN also maintains protocol parameter registries for the IETF by providing the IANA function, a service that we are very happy with. Finally, both the IETF and ICANN are part of the overall ecosystem of Internet organisations, each responsible for the different important tasks that are needed for the global Internet to grow and develop. Thank you, ICANN!

We also have BT as our connectivity sponsor. This is also very important for our bandwidth-hungry geeks. Thank you, BT, for your support!

But I am sure that you want to know what happens in the meeting itself. It looks to be once again an exciting week. Here are some highlights from my perspective, in the order that they happen during the week.

• The STRINT workshop organised by the IAB and W3C, Friday February 28 – Saturday March 1, focuses on the question on how can we improve the privacy and security of the Internet, in the face of pervasive monitoring. The workshop is already full, but papers for the workshop are available and look very interesting.
• Code sprint, Saturday, March 1, is where volunteers from around the IETF work on improving the IETF web, data tracker, and other tools. If you can, join us!
• Technical plenary, Monday, March 3, discusses payment and digital cash architectures such as Bitcoin. Is there work for the IETF in this space?
• ISOC briefing panel, Tuesday, March 4, discusses the evolution of the end-to-end principle, and how it matches today’s networking needs.
• Virtualized Network Function Pool (VNFPOOL) BOF, Tuesday March 4, looks at ways to provide functions such as firewalling as virtual services in the network rather than as a part of monolithic devices.
• DNS Encryption (DNSE) BOF, Tuesday, March 4, discusses how to provide confidentiality for domain name services.
• Authentication and Authorization in Constrained Environments (ACE) BOF, Wednesday, March 5, discusses the need for mechanisms that allow Internet-of-Things devices to answer authorisation questions.
• Transport Services (TAPS) BOF, Wednesday, March 5, asks if a new API to transport services could facilitate the use of new IETF transport services.
• DNS Boundaries (DBOUND) BOF, Thursday, March 6, looks at the problem determining boundaries between public and organisation-dependent parts of a domain name (such as “example” and “co.uk” in “example.co.uk”.
• Internet Governance Update (IGOVUPDATE) IAB meeting, Thursday, March 6, discusses how we at the IETF see future evolution of IANA services.

I look forward to the meeting, and would like to welcome you all to the meeting. And if you have not signed up yet, you can still register.