Re: List of volunteers for the 2021-2022 NomCom

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

There are various speculations as to why Nomcom is not supported at the level that it used to be.

An explanation that warrants investigation is whether this is structural. This is important because it is less easily reversed.

The organizations that used to make money from the Internet were the network equipment vendors. There was a good match between their needs and the IETF core capabilities, and the IETF thrived as part of a symbiotic relationship. If the network vendors are not making money out of the Internet at the level that they used to, they will not invest in the IETF at anything like their previous level. They will naturally stop paying the IETF “tax" on their business activities. The situation seems to be that it is now the Internet content and application providers instead  that take the majority of the profit.  However, the equipment vendors are unlikely to be replaced by the content and application providers in investing in the IETF, because their business model is to assume that a basic Internet is there where they need it, and to focus on delivering content and applications using content caches and edge computing so that their service is not degraded by performance issues in the best effort end to end Internet. There is indeed a hypothesis that so long as is is possible to get a tunnel between their application at the client and their application at the edge of the cloud, nothing else needs to be standardised other than through their internal private design process or through open source. 

Students of business know that the impact of such industry structural change can be sudden and decisive.  If this hypothesis is correct, the IETF faces a significant existential threat. 

Managing the IETF though or hopefully out of a decline that results from significant  industry structural change will be the most difficult task that the IESG has needed to address in the last 20 years.

- Stewart