Re: Proposed Statement on "HTTPS everywhere for the IETF"

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 08:06:45PM -0700, Tony Hain wrote:
> Put another way; if the IESG believes it has the excess time to make
> clearly political statements (rather than focus on the justifiable
> technical requirement), maybe we need to revisit the workload on the
> NomCom and reduce the number of ADs...

You do realize that the IETF *is* a political body...  It being an
organization with more than one participant and all.

The process for publishing RFCs is... political.  The process for
changing the process (but I repeat myself) is political.

How can the IETF be utterly non-political?

I would agree that the IETF should stay away from certain kinds of
political statements, but this isn't it, not least because I can't see
what is controversial or politically objectionable about this statement
in the wider world outside just the IETF.  Will the public in the U.S.
object?  Doubtful.  How about the public in the UK?  Also doubtful.  And
so on and on.  Did the public complain about all the https-only sites
out there?  No, the public did not.

Can we stop it with this thread?  What a waste of time!  For goodness'
sakes, go ahead and make all IETF services TLS-capable, and then someday
let's throw the switch see what happens when we redirect http resources
to https for one day -- if nothing breaks badly that we don't mind
breaking, then let's make that permanent.  How can that possibly be so
damned controversial?  github, for example, did it, and so did many
others -- sites with paying customers.

Nico
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