The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), cooperating closely with the W3C The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of June 2009, the W3C had 388 members and ISO The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO (pronounced /ˈaɪsoʊ/), is an international-standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary industrial and commercial standards. It is/IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission is a not-for-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology". IEC standards cover a vast range of technologies from power standard bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP The Internet Protocol Suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is named from two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were the first two networking protocols defined in this standard. Today's IP networking and Internet protocol suite The Internet Protocol Suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is named from two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were the first two networking protocols defined in this standard. Today's IP networking. It is an open standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards development organization or SDO is any entity whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise maintaining standards that address the interests of a wide base of users outside the standards development organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and leaders are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSign VeriSign, Inc. is an American company based in Mountain View, California that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the generic top-level domains for .com and .net, one of the largest SS7 signaling networks in North America, and the RFID directory for EPCGlobal. VeriSign also and the U.S. government's National Security Agency The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States government, administered as part of the United States Department of Defense. Created on November 4, 1952 by President Harry S. Truman, it is responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals.[1]

Contents

Organization

The IETF is organized into a large number of working groups It operates on rough consensus, is open to all who want to participate, has discussions on an open mailing list, and may hold meetings at IETF meetings. Unlike, for instance, IEEE working groups, the mailing list consensus is the final arbiter of decision-making, and there is no voting procedure, but a "rough consensus" procedure and informal discussion groups (BoF)s The term is derived from the proverb "Birds of a feather flock together", each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then disband. Each working group has an appointed chair (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce.

The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group It provides the final technical review of Internet standards and is responsible for day-to-day management of the IETF. It receives appeals of the decisions of the working groups, and the IESG makes the decision to progress documents in the standards track (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF.

The IETF is formally an activity under the umbrella of the Internet Society The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. It states that its mission is "to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board The Internet Architecture Board is the committee charged with oversight of the technical and engineering development of the Internet by the Internet Society (ISOC) (IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor In computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity The IASA is described by RFC 4071, an IETF Request for Comments document, released in April, 2005 (IASA), which provides logistical, etc support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force The Internet Research Task Force is a sister group to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Its stated mission is “To promote research of importance to the evolution of the future Internet by creating focused, long-term and small Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology” (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.

History

The first IETF meeting was on January 16 January 16 is the 16th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 349 days remaining until the end of the year, 1986 1986 was a common year starting on Wednesday (link displays 1986 Gregorian calendar). It was designated the International Year of Peace by the United Nations, consisting of 21 U.S.-government-funded researchers. It was a continuation of the work of the earlier GADS Task Force The Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force was the precursor to the Internet Engineering Task Force. Its chairman was David L. Mills of the University of Delaware.

Initially, it met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting 3 times a year. Representatives from non-governmental entities were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting, in October of that year. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to the public. The majority of the IETF's work is done on mailing lists, and meeting attendance is not required for contributors.

The initial meetings were very small, with fewer than 35 people in attendance at each of the first five meetings. The peak attendance in the first 13 meetings was only 120 attendees. This occurred at the 12th meeting held in January 1989. These meetings have grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 1990s; it had a peak attendance of almost 3000 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, CA. Attendance declined with industry restructuring in the early 2000s, and is currently around 1200.[2]

During the early 1990s the IETF changed institutional form from an activity of the U.S. government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. It states that its mission is "to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world".

Operations

The IETF has at times been ascribed nearly magical abilities by the trade press, who assumed its mechanisms were responsible for the success of the Internet because it works on the Internet's core protocols. The reality that it is a group of engineers putting together specifications so that multiple vendors' products can operate across networks is considerably more mundane.

The details of its operations have changed considerably as it has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of draft specifications, review and independent testing by participants, and republication. Interoperability is the chief test for IETF specifications becoming standards. Most of its specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly-interlocked systems. This has allowed its protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP The 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, to make a globally applicable third generation (3G) mobile phone system specification within the scope of the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 project of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). 3GPP specifications are IMS The IP Multimedia Subsystem is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), as a part of the vision for evolving mobile networks beyond GSM. Its original formulation (3GPP R5) represented an approach to).

Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code Rough consensus is a term used in consensus decision-making to indicate the "sense of the group" concerning a particular matter under consideration. It has been defined as the "dominant view" of a group as determined by its chairperson. The term was first used by the Internet Engineering Task Force in describing its procedures" as its touchstone, results can be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress, or so large as to make consensus difficult, or when volunteers lack the necessary expertise. For protocols like SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP was first defined in RFC 821 (STD 10), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change that is not fully backwards compatible. Work within the IETF on ways to improve the speed of the standards-making process is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus mechanisms on how to improve have been slow.

Because the IETF does not have members (nor is it an organisation per se), the Internet Society The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. It states that its mission is "to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world" provides the financial and legal framework for the activities of the IETF and its sister bodies (IAB, IRTF,...). Recently the IETF has set up an IETF Trust that manages the copyrighted materials produced by the IETF. IETF activities are funded by meeting fees, meeting sponsors and by the Internet Society The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. It states that its mission is "to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world" via its organizational membership and the proceeds of the Public Interest Registry Public Interest Registry is a not-for-profit corporation created by the Internet Society in 2002 to manage the .org top-level domain. It took over the operation of the domain from VeriSign on 1 January 2003. Afilias manages the technical operations of the .org registry under a contract with the Public Interest Registry.

IETF meetings vary greatly in where they are held. The list of past and future meeting locations can be found on the IETF meetings page. The IETF has strived to hold the meetings near where most of the IETF volunteers are located. For a long time, the goal was 3 meetings a year, with 2 in North America and 1 in either Europe or Asia (alternating between them every other year). The goal ratio is currently, across a two year period, to have 3 in North America, 2 in Europe and 1 in Asia. However, corporate sponsorship of the meetings is typically a more important factor and this schedule has not been kept strictly in order to decrease operational costs.

IETF chairs

The IETF Chair is selected by the NOMCOM process specified in RFC 3777 for a 2-year term, renewable.

Before 1993, the IETF Chair was selected by the IAB The Internet Architecture Board is the committee charged with oversight of the technical and engineering development of the Internet by the Internet Society (ISOC).

See also

References

  1. ^ Duffy Marsan, Carolyn (July 26 July 26 is the 207th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 158 days remaining until the end of the year, 2007 2007 was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century). "Q&A: Security top concern for new IETF chair". Network World (IDG). http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/073007-ietf-qa.html. Retrieved on 2008-04-20.
  2. ^ "Past Meetings of the IETF". http://www.ietf.org/meetings/past.meetings.html. Retrieved on 2008-08-05.
  3. ^ "IETF Chairs by year". http://www.ietf.org/ietf_chairs_year.html. Retrieved on 2007-03-23.

External links

Categories: Internet governance The Internet is not controlled by a single person or body in the way that a corporation or a state might be. Instead, different functions are carried out by different bodies, in a way which is still evolving. This category pulls together articles on the organization of the Internet and on the bodies and groups which have a role in its development | Computer network organizations Categories: Computer networking | Computer-related organizations | Standards organizations Categories: Organizations by subject | Standards | Measurement | Government bodies

 

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