EARLY HISTORY OF INTERNET STANDARDIZATION AND THE ROLE OF THE IETF5

The origins of the Internet standardization process can be traced to a series of infor­mal meetings that were held over the period 1968-72. These meetings initially involved four computer science contractors to the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),⁶ but they quickly expanded to include individuals from other computer network research groups from industry and universities and they eventually led to the establishment of protocols for communications over a packet-switched network.

The RFC process eventually came to be organized under the auspices of the Network Working Group in 1972 and in 1979 the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB) was established to advise DARPA on ‘the technical evolution of the protocol suite’ (Cerf, 1990). The ICCB was reorganized as the Internet Activities Board (IAB) in 1983, and in 1986 the IAB created the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which became ‘the main forum in which the [Internet] technical standards were proposed, tested, and debated’ (Froomkin, 2003, p. 787).⁷ In 1992, the Internet Society was formed and sub­sequently undertook a number of actions in support of the IETF standards process (Cerf, 1995).

Contributions to the IETF standards process are accepted from those with the inter­est, time, and ability to make them and decisions are made by consensus. The process can be described as ‘meritocratic’ - decisions are based largely on the quality of proposals, ‘democratic’ - there is little or no hierarchy, ‘informal’ - decisions are based on broad agreement among the participants, and ‘pragmatic’ - whether something actually works is critical to its acceptance. In the words of David Clark, ‘We reject: kings, presidents and voting.

The IETF is generally seen as an organization in which decisions are made solely or primarily on technical grounds, that is, they are made largely without regard to commer­cial considerations.⁸ Drake has noted, for example, that:

[t]he ‘new paradigm’ standardization... process is controlled less by [Public Telecommunications Operators] and large equipment manufacturers and more by a plethora of advanced users, spe­cialized suppliers, systems integrators, research institutions, and so on... This new model is emerging in a variety of specialized industry fora outside the ‘official’ multilateral bodies like the ITU and ISO, and has been most thoroughly realized in the TCP/IP based Internet community. (Drake, 1993, p. 644)

Similarly, as one of us has observed, ‘The basic Internet protocols were developed in the 1970s and 1980s and, to coordinate their development, called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) family, the IETF was formed in the 1980s as a vol­untary, unincorporated, non-governmental meritocracy open to anyone capable of con­tributing to their goals’ (Sadowsky et al., 2004).⁹ As some of the founders of the Internet put it, ‘by 1990... TCP had supplanted or marginalized most other wide-area computer network protocols worldwide, and IP was well on its way to becoming THE bearer service for the Global Information Infrastructure’ (Leiner et al., 2003).

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