The Internet is an anomaly in more than one way. It is a motley collection of technologies that are not legally owned by any single entity or any collection of legally-recognized entities. That is pretty impressive considering there is a United States patent on the process of exercising one’s cat by moving around a laser beam projection as the cat tries to catch it.
The Internet Engineering Task Force makes standards for the Internet. These are protocols that computing systems like laptops, cell phones or tablets, connected via the Internet, need to follow to communicate through the Internet. For example, every time you type “www.google.com” in your browser, your computer follows certain rules of communication with the Google computers and brings you the Google homepage. These rules are defined by the IETF.
The IETF decided to do a cool thing: They decided to not register as a legal organization. While other Standards Development Organizations are tied up with governments and have their standards as legally-owned documents, the IETF publishes open documents and has an open process of making them. This means anyone can help make these standards and adopt them in their software and hardware. Yet, most of the standards from IETF are the norm in the network industry. A lot of governments cite these standards as references. Most of the success of the Internet can be attributed to these shepherds of the Internet.
Unlike other SDOs and public organizations, the IETF does not decide on standards by vote or elections. They believe in a concept called “rough consensus.” Typically, at the end of a technical debate, the chair for the group will ask how many agree with the proposal at hand. There is a show of hands and the hands are not typically counted. Instead, a rough fraction is observed and the majority wins. A geekier alternative is to hum. The chair asks all those who agree with the proposal or debate at hand to hum. This way, one’s opinion cannot be swayed by looking at whose hands are raised, as the volume of hums makes identity indiscernible.
Considering the technical documents that the IETF make practically run the Internet, it is amazing that they depend on roughconsensus and do not need elaborate parliamentary hierarchy to function. The amount of stress that is laid on robust standards is enormous. Proposals that became standards are often started by individuals and developed upon encouragement from the whole community. These are then criticized, debated and rounded into proper standards.
Creating good standards means to avoid a lot of real industry issues like not letting the technology standard bias toward a particular company such that it enters into a lock down. Inter-operability and generic-ness of the standard such that competition is encouraged is a goal. With representations from multiple fellow competitors sitting in the crowd, the rough consensus is often achieved by the most robust technology.
IETF takes pride in being comprised of people and not the companies that these people represent. Work and opinions cited in technical debates are accounted for as one’s own and not of the organization for which one works. At a high level, the technologies that enter the battleground are ones driven by the needs of the industry. It makes perfect sense for the companies that face the need for standards to propose them and get accepted by the industry at large.
Everything is not rosy and charming for the IETF. It often runs into issues of intellectual properties and standards process with other SDOs. There are areas of the Internet technologies that are standardized by other SDOs and in fields that overlap with the IETF there are gray areas.
IETF pretty much sticks a middle finger out to organizations. Without elections or votes or dictatorship, the IETF manages to run the Internet and continues to improve it.