Re: [Lake] Call for adoption for draft-selander-lake-edhoc - respond by June 22

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020, at 23:54, Mališa Vučinić wrote:
> we are now launching a call for adoption for 
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-selander-lake-edhoc-01.

I was reluctant to respond to this thread, because it generally isn't worth stopping other people from doing something they want to do.  And I'm aware that the contract implied by the formation of this working group - at least in the minds of many - was the development of a new AKE.

The time that others spend isn't the only factor we should use to decide.  As others have noted, adoption of an entirely new AKE means more than just the time that those other people spend.  I have no skin in the maintenance of IoT products, but the concerns raised about fracturing and maintenance overheads there are serious.  My concern is for the split this creates between endpoints that choose option A and endpoints that choose option B.

When CoAP was proposed, I didn't have the same presence of mind as others [1] to recognize the harm inherent in defining something like HTTP that wasn't HTTP.  It's easy to point to adoption of CoAP and use that to claim success, but that misses the true costs.  The true failure is the creation of a set of endpoints that don't talk to other endpoints.  The IETF made the choice to actively help create a division in the market.  Maybe these endpoints might never have been able to communicate (MQTT is, after all, largely outside our control), but the choice by the IETF to XKCD 927 didn't really help.

For us, this failure manifests in a great deal of expenditure on parallel infrastructure and standards development.  For the market, who we leave to choose, the cost is in the creation of non-interoperable islands.  The market also pays through the dilution of resources that we dedicate to the improvement of the commons, of which protocols are some of the most valuable assets.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-montenegro-httpbis-h2ot-00