Request for Comments
draft-carpenter-request-for-comments-00

Abstract

This document discusses the Internet technical community's common document series.

Status of This Memo

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This Internet-Draft will expire on December 8, 2018.

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Table of Contents

• 1. TL;DR
• 2. The Problems with the RFC Series
• 3. Who Owns the RFC Series?
• 4. Request for Comments means Request for Comments
• 5. Experiments
• 6. Security Considerations
• 7. IANA Considerations
• 8. Acknowledgements
• 9. Informative References
• Appendix A. Change log [RFC Editor: Please remove]
• Author's Address

1. TL;DR

"I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected." [RFC0001], Steve Crocker, 7 April 1969.

2. The Problems with the RFC Series

It's very clear that there are problems with the RFC series. For example, [RFC0791] is so badly written that it would never pass an IETF working group last call, let alone an IETF last call or an IESG review today. Yet it will be exercised billions of times today and every day. Another example is that a newcomer wishing to implement even the simplest mail user agent will not find an RFC telling her how to do so. A method to mitigate this problem has been proposed but not adopted [I-D.ietf-newtrk-sample-isd]. A related problem is that finding the latest version of a standard requires arcane knowledge; for example, someone looking for the latest IPv6 standard via the popular search tools is more than likely to end up consulting the obsolete RFC2460. (The IETF web site's search tool returns no results for "IPv6 standard".)

A major gripe about the RFC series is its limitation to ASCII and its reliance on typewriter-friendly formatting. Fortunately this is being worked on actively, so is not further discussed here.

An occasional annoyance is that since the RFC series is long established and serves a very wide community of authors, it includes only some documents that are formally agreed statements of IETF rough consensus and even fewer that are formally agreed statements of IETF rough consensus about proposed standards or best current practice. The IETF has preferred to maintain a distinction between proposed standards and Internet standards, which means that there are even fewer RFCs designated as Internet standards. An attempt to fix that particular problem by reducing the number and hence complexity of the categories [RFC6410] has not appeared to make significant improvements in either the confusion or the ratio of Internet Standards to Proposed ones. Efforts to reduce the distinction and provide stable references to at least the current versions of updated standards (e.g., [I-D.klensin-std-numbers]) have received little interest.

This problem area has been well known for many years [RFC1796] and has occasionally led to concern that some vendors might mislead customers by claiming conformance with a non-standard RFC. For this reason, the header text on RFCs was clarified some years ago such that readers can clearly distinguish standards from non-standards. The original version of this was "This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind." and has been used (with occasional updates to the wording) since 1994, well before [RFC1796] was published.

There is therefore no lack of clarity, and has been none since 1994, about which RFCs are normative statements of consensus and which are not. Certainly, some readers will bypass the header text as "TL;DR" (too long; didn't read) or ignore it as "DK;DC" (don't know; don't care) but there is literally nothing the IETF can do about that. (In the new RFC format, it would be possible and perhaps desirable to use special typography to emphasise the document status, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem of human behaviour, because nothing can.)

3. Who Owns the RFC Series?

         "Such purposes include, but are not limited to, the advancement
         of education and public interest by acquiring, holding,
         maintaining and licensing certain existing and future
         intellectual property and other property used in connection
         with the Internet standards process and its administration, for
         the advancement of the science and technology associated with
         the Internet and related technology."
         (IETF Trust Agreement, 2005)

I am not asking this question in a legal sense. The copyright in the RFC series currently belongs to the IETF Trust in addition to the authors, but the Trust's purposes are broad:

It's easier to answer the converse question: who doesn't own the RFC series?

         "Such educational, charitable, and scientific purposes
         shall include carrying on activities:

         1. To facilitate and support the technical evolution of the
         Internet as a research and education infrastructure, and to
         stimulate the involvement of the scientific community, industry,
         government and others in the evolution of the Internet;
         2. To educate the scientific community, industry and the public
         at large concerning the technology, use and application of the
         Internet;
         3. To promote educational applications of Internet technology
         for the benefit of government, colleges and universities,
         industry, and the public at large;
         4. To provide a forum for exploration of new Internet
         applications, and to stimulate collaboration among organizations
         in their operational use of the global Internet."
         (Articles of Incorporation of the Internet Society)

         "The RFC series constitutes the archival publication channel
         for Internet Standards and for other contributions by the
         Internet research and engineering community. RFCs are available
         free of charge to anyone via the Internet. The IAB must approve
         the appointment of an organization to act as RFC Editor and the
         general policy followed by the RFC Editor."
 

1. It's clear that the IETF doesn't own it, because the series preceded the IETF by 17 years.
2. Therefore, of course, the IESG doesn't own it.
3. At some point in history, both ARPA (who funded the ARPAnet) and ISI (who provided RFC editing under contract) could have made a claim. But that faded when a paid RFC Editor was directly contracted by ISOC.
4. ISOC could certainly make a claim, having funded the series for many years now. However, ISOC, like the IETF Trust, has a broad mission:
5. Finally, the Internet Architecture Board could make a claim based on its charter [RFC2850], which states that:

The reasonable conclusion from the above is that none of the I* organisations (IETF Trust, IETF, IESG, IAB or ISOC) can claim exclusivity of ownership or control over the RFC series. It is community property.

An important consequence is that major decisions about the future of the RFC Series must be taken by a consensus of a very broad community. That doesn't mean the IETF or the IAB. It means the IETF and IAB, plus the IRTF, plus many other people who have contributed to, or made use of, the RFC Series over the last fifty years. How to reach out to this community is in itself a big question.

4. Request for Comments means Request for Comments

Politicians make such absurd statements, so I reckon I can too.

There is an inherent modesty in calling IETF consensus documents "requests for comments". As the above quotation from RFC1 said right at the beginning, we get things wrong. We want comments, we want errata, we want operational feedback, and we want to go round that loop again each time we update a standard. When we forget that, we are getting dangerously close to arrogance and hubris.

Avoiding this trap is indeed the reason that the community has always published a number of RFCs that are not the product of organised groups, formalised some years ago as the Independent Stream of RFCs [RFC4844]. Whether they document deployed solutions not invented in the IETF, or alternative solutions not accepted by the IETF, or informed technical opinions not discussed in the IETF, they remain part of the broader community's open record, and a useful counter-balance to any occurrence of groupthink in the IETF, IRTF or IAB.

Calling IETF standards "requests for comments" is what distinguishes the IETF from most other standards organisations, and it's the right thing to do.

5. Experiments

RFC1 started an experiment, which has been fairly successful so far, certainly with consequences that were not foreseen at the time. Another experiment was the IEN (Internet Experiment Note) series, which ran from 1977 to 1982. Another one was the ION (IETF Operational Notes) series, which ran briefly in 2006/7 [RFC4693]. Finally, the usage of the RFC subseries designated "FYI", "STD", or "BCP" has had limited success. "FYI" has been dropped, "STD" is fairly useless as it is only applied to full Internet standards (despite proposals to widen it, as mentioned above), and "BCP" has been reasonably successful.

The next planned experiment is the major upgrade of RFC formatting, which will inevitably cause some disturbance to the document production process when it goes live.

A full analysis of these various experiments, their goals, and their successes and failures, seems necessary before designing any future experiment in the area of document series.

6. Security Considerations

Security issues are discussed in all recent RFCs. This uniformity illustrates the coherence of the RFC series and the way it has been used to ensure a degree of order in the chaotic world of Internet design, implementation and deployment.

7. IANA Considerations

This document makes no request of the IANA. Like the RFC series, the IANA is a service provided for the benefit of the entire Internet technical community in a coherent and consistent way.

8. Acknowledgements

Useful comments were received from John Klensin, ...

9. Informative References

Appendix A. Change log [RFC Editor: Please remove]

draft-carpenter-request-for-comments-00, 2018-06-06:

Initial version

Author's Address