Re: Is IETF is being shunned for new protocol development?

["Rob Wilton (rwilton)" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Tom,

Aren't the realities here that folks will take the work to wherever is the most effective place to get the work done, by whatever metric they calculate effectiveness as.

I'm probably way over simplifying and mischaracterising things and I wasn't there, but this feels a little bit like how I understood the IETF vs OSI protocol battle.

At that time, it feels like IETF was the more agile party that moved fast to just get something working and then started working out the kinks later.  Some of those early protocol documents really were draft standards compared to what is published as standards track RFCs today.

Now, it seems to me, that perhaps it is the IETF that is the larger slower moving organisation, and these other organisations are being more agile, and there are simply no prizes for coming second.

I think that you just need to look at how hard/expensive it is for the IETF to tweak or update its process documents to see some of the structural problems that I believe that it faces.  As you point out, it is so much easier to really slow down work that doesn't have very strong consensus that this puts many folks off even trying to make some of the structural changes that the IETF would likely benefit from.  To give a concrete example, the moderation policy document has over 2500 emails discussing it!  Most sane organisations would not see that as a reasonable amount of time/work/effort to tackle that sort of issue, which if it doesn't go right the first time, can just be tweaked in future.

In some measures you could argue that IETF has been very successful, i.e., in terms of the number of RFCs that it has published, and the impact that it has had on the success of the Internet,  but not taking away from the fact that it seems like the Internet is also facing some major challenges.

But, well, if you count the number of actual STANDARDS​ that the IETF has published, as opposed to draft or proposed standards then I would argue that it is much harder to argue that the IETF has been successful as an SDO.  Given that is has only published 102 standards over a 40 year period, that means that the IETF only actually manages to publish 2-3 standards per year ...  Of course, obviously, this just really means that the naming of the documents is wrong, but why do you think that nobody has succeeded in fixing this over the 40 years that the IETF has been publishing RFCs.

If we want folks to bring new work to the IETF then the IETF has become the most effective place to get that work done.

Kind regards,
Rob


From: Tom Herbert <tom=[e-mail]>
Date: Wednesday, 14 January 2026 at 19:37
To: IETF-Discussion <[e-mail]>
Subject: Is IETF is being shunned for new protocol development?

Hello,

FYI, I would like to share a letter I sent to IAB about a concern that
IETF may be losing relevance particularly in AI networking.
-----
Dear IAB,

I would like to bring to your attention a worrisome trend that IETF is
being shunned as the SDO for developing an standandardizing new >=L3
protocols particularly those needed for networking in AI
infrastructure which is among the hottest segments for new protocol
development.

A good example is the protocols being developed by the Ultra Ethernet
Consortium (UEC). UEC is acting as a new SDO aimed at developing scale
out networking protocols for AI and HPC infrastructure. The name is
misnomer; they are actively developing a suite of L2 to L7 protocols
including an elaborate transport protocol encapsulated in UDP to
support Remote Memory Operations.

Another example is the Open Compute Project. Back in 2024 the
Congestion Signaling draft was posted to the ippm working group.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ravi-ippm-csig-01.html. While
the draft has long since expired in IETF, the protocol is well
deployed at least at Google I believe and there is hardware vendor
support for the protocol. Standardization of CSIG is being done in
either OCP (or UEC), but notably not the IETF.

When I ask people  why they're not taking protocols to IETF, they give
three reasons:

1) It takes too long for IETF to do anything

2) The process allows for anyone at anytime to raise objections and
either bring progress to a grinding halt or sink a protocol outright

3) IETF can be too academic and not sufficiently focused on the
realities of the real world

I have seen each of these problems first hand so I do sympathize with
those who are purposely avoiding IETF. On the other hand, I think they
are throwing the "baby out with the bathwater"  so to speak since
these alternate SDOs have yet to show better results. For instance, I
believe the UEC specification would be in much better shape had it
followed a few basic design principles that are espoused by IETF
(here's my article on the problems with UEC protocol specification
https://medium.com/@tom_84912/protocol-types-and-what-was-uec-thinking-66b525765577)

Please take this into consideration, as I do worry that IETF could
start to be left behind in the world of protocol development. I'm not
sure how the concerns can be addressed, maybe there could be something
like a streamlined standardization process for non-Internet wide
protocols like those being developed for AI infrastructure? Also, I
believe there's only one working group for AI, maybe it would make
sense to have a Working Group specifically focused on networking
protocols for AI infrastructure (I would note that OCP has completely
pivoted to be AI focussed and they drew 12,000 people on-site to their
2025 conference-- that is mind blowing).

Thanks,
Tom