net.stewards [Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)]

Michael Thomas wrote:
> Scott W Brim wrote:
> 
>> On 09/15/2005 17:09 PM, Paul Hoffman allegedly wrote:
>>
>>> At 1:50 PM -0700 9/15/05, Michael Thomas wrote:
>>>
>>>> Which is pretty much the elephant in the room, I'd say. How
>>>> much of the net traffic these days is, essentially, not in
>>>> any way standardized, and in fact probably considers ietf
>>>> old and in the way?
>>>
>>>
>>> Not sure why this is an elephant; who cares? I have seen numbers that
>>> show that a huge percentage of traffic is P2P of various flavors, but I
>>> haven't seen anyone saying that this is having any negative effects.
>>
>>
>>
>> The metaphor I'm trying to use this week is that the IETF is
>> landscapers and we provide a fertile, beautiful area for people to go
>> wild and create excellent gardens.  What you're describing is not a
>> bug, it's feature.  It means the IETF have done their job.  If there
>> were interoperability problems in the fundamental and/or widespread
>> technologies being used in the Internet, then there would be a problem
>> (we're working on those).  Congratulations.
> 
> 
> Perfect. And then someone with less clue decided to
> plant Kudzu. We have nothing to say about that?

I just read today that kudzu extract may reduce the desire
for alcohol (Scientific American, 8/2005, p 17). What seems
evil may not always be evil.
> 
> I know that we aren't the net.cops, but are we not
> net.stewards either?

Up to a point, but there are limits to what we can do.

We can request that the RFC Editor not publish things we think
are damaging. The IESG does this a few times a year. Similarly,
we can request that IANA not register things we think are
damaging, or at least to label them as potentially dangerous.

We can publish screeds about damaging practices. The IAB does this
a few times a year.

We can try to develop non-damaging solutions for requirements where
the easy solutions are damaging, and we can try to repair our own
damage (as HTTP 1.1 repairs HTTP 1.0).

We can try to ensure that the Internet can 'route around damage' -
that's one of the main reasons for defending the e2e principle,
for example.

But we can't prevent people from deploying solutions that we
didn't develop, and we shouldn't even try to IMHO.

    Brian

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