Re: email standards

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 9/23/2014 2:56 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>         The original point was
> that we might have done better with a facilitator in the room with

There were multiple facilitators in that room, back then.

Facilitators cannot help resolve differences in religion or paradigms.

And within the IETF sandbox, facilitation for paradigm differences has
been tried many other times, such as for network management and routing.

It's never been successful and sometimes has made things worse.  (Think
ASN.1 for SNMP...)



>> FWIW, it's unlikely that the competition in this case has had anything
>> to do with the poor uptake of either mechanism.
...
> In practice the continued standards deadlock is allowing both camps to
> put off accepting the fact that they have not succeeded.

Competition has often been quite successful.  Think SNMP/CMOT again, and
various other IETF-based contests.

So while your point sounds like reasonable theory, I doubt it has any
objective basis, since most discussions about the failure to adopt
end2end confidentiality cite barriers in key management and human
factors usability (for end users and for sysadmins.)

IPv6 "won" long ago, but after 25 years still has only modest uptake.
DNSSec stabilized 10-15 years ago, but still has only modest uptake.

Competition is not the barrier causing these sorts of adoption problems.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net