Re: [Patient] the IETF participant choice

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 19, 2018, at 8:01 PM, Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]> wrote:
> In participating remotely, it was apparent that although the proponents of the data centre visibility proposal did an excellent job in articulating the need, the solution was not going to be undertaken by the IETF.  The result in consonant with countless other similar initiatives sought in the IETF over the past several decades.

The thing is, at least from my perspective, we haven't done a systems analysis yet, and so it was just premature to try to get the TLS working group to weaken TLS in order to solve the problem.   For example, the claim was made that it would be "too expensive" to do anything _other_ than modify TLS, but where's the analysis to support that position?   Too expensive to use middleboxes, but where's the analysis there?

This is really an ops problem.   IETF can do ops work, but ops isn't about changing protocols—it's about figuring out good solutions to problems.   Sometimes the answer to an ops problem is "we need some protocol work done," but that's not the starting point.

As a consequence, I feel like some very well-meaning people came to the IETF with hat in hand and didn't get what they'd hoped for, and probably have the impression that people here don't care about their problem, when that's not actually the case.   Lots of people I talked to who were against the proposed solution care very much about the problem.