Minutes of the 2021-10-06 IAB Teleconference

1. Administrivia

1.1. Attendance

Present:

• Jari Arkko
• Deborah Brungard
• Ben Campbell
• Wes Hardaker
• Cullen Jennings
• Mirja Kühlewind (IAB Chair)
• Zhenbin Li
• Jared Mauch
• Cindy Morgan (IAB Executive Administrative Manager)
• Tommy Pauly
• Karen O’Donoghue (ISOC Liaison)
• Colin Perkins (IRTF Chair)
• Amy Vezza (IETF Secretariat)
• Martin Vigoureux (IESG Liaison)
• Russ White
• Jiankang Yao

Regrets:

• Lars Eggert (IETF Chair)
• David Schinazi

Guests:

• Constance Bommelaer
• Olaf Kolkman
• Elizabeth Oluoch
• Andrei Robachevsky

Observers:

• Chris Box
• Daniel Migault
• Greg Wood

1.2. Agenda bash and announcements

1.3. Meeting Minutes

The following minutes were approved:

• 2021-09-22 business meeting – (posted 2021-09-22)

1.4. Action item review

Done:

• 2021-09-22: Cindy Morgan to notify the candidate who was not chosen for the ICANN NomCom position.
• 2021-09-22: Cindy Morgan to send the chosen ICANN NomCom candidate to the ICANN NomCom Ops team, and announce the appointment.
• 2021-08-25: Jari Arkko to reach out to Ted Hardie regarding the ICANN RSS GWG.

On Hold:

• 2021-04-07: Wes Hardaker (with Cullen Jennings, Colin Perkins, and Russ White) to come up with a list of subjective tags that define common characteristics of good RFCs.

In Progress:

• 2021-04-27: Deborah Brungard to work with Alvaro Retana (Jiankang Yao, Zhenbin Li) on a proposal about the IAB coordinating outreach efforts.
• 2021-04-29: Tommy Pauly to come up with a list of things for the IAB to review during the WG chartering process.
• 2021-05-26: Russ White and Jared Mauch to review the IAB discussion on “The Internet of Three Protocols” and draft a problem statement to see if there is work that the IAB can do in this space.
• 2021-06-30: Colin Perkins to see if he can find someone to speak to the IAB about data privacy and the role of data (AI efforts).
• 2021-06-30: Colin Perkins to work with Cindy Morgan to schedule review of ICNRG.
• 2021-08-25: Mirja Kühlewind and the Liaison Coordinators to set up a formal liaison relationship with ISO/TC 154.
• 2021-09-01: Jari Arkko to continue editing the document on the role of discovery in ensuring that Internet technology is broadly applicable.
• 2021-09-08: Liaison Coordinators to come up with a list of potential candidates to reach out to for future IAB-appointed positions.
• 2021-09-22: Cindy Morgan to document the current membership of the iab@iab.org mailing list on the IAB website.

New:

• 2021-10-06: IAB and ISOC to coordinate via email to set up a group to agree on some high-level guidelines about how ISOC can talk about IETF at WTSA.
• 2021-10-06: Cindy Morgan to send draft-iab-use-it-or-lose-it to the RFC Editor for publication once the final pull request is merged into the document.

1.5. IAB Document Status Update

Datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/stream/iab/

• draft-iab-arpa-authoritative-servers-01
  IAB State: Sent to RFC Editor
  RFC Editor State: IANA
• draft-iab-protocol-maintenance-05
  IAB State: Active IAB Document
• draft-iab-use-it-or-lose-it-02
  IAB State: Community Review ended 2021-09-22

1.6. WG Chartering in Progress

Datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/chartering/

• Oblivious HTTP Application Intermediation (ohai)
  [Formerly Oblivious Applications using Relayed HTTP (oarh),
  Oblivious HTTP (ohttp)]
  IESG state: Approved pending the addition of chairs

2. Changes in the policy landscape and the roles of ISOC and the IAB

Olaf Kolkman joined the IAB to talk about changes in the policy landscape.

Standard-setting has always been used as a tool for trade policy, public policy, and industry policy. ISOC has observed the following trends:

• China’s explicit policy goal to become a standards maker instead of standards taker
• Russia’s push for digital sovereignty
• Europe’s focus on its internal market

There have been concrete interventions at the policy level. The G7 Ministerial Declaration in 2021 mentioned standards-making for the first time. Standards also emerged in several UN processes, including the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap on Digital Cooperation, which calls for UN agency-wide review of engineering and ethical standards for AI.

ISOC has observed that governments want to be included in standards development. The narrative by some governments at the UN and ITU is that the standardization gap in the Global South poses risk to international security and peace, and agencies such as the ITU provide an inclusive platform for all governments to introduce/develop any technical standards. Industry responses to China’s ambitions put stress on the standardization world. A fully-driven market approach of standardization is gaining the attention of governments, civil society, and academics. Many countries do not believe that the current Internet governance model is addressing their issues.

Upcoming hotspots where states are getting involved include:

• Framework for G7 Collaboration on Digital Technical Standards
• World Telecommunication Standards Assembly (WTSA-02\\20)
• ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2022

Issues that are expected to be raised at WTSA-20 include:

• New IP
• New Technologies: AI)/ ML, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Information-centric Networking (ICN), Quantum information technologies, blockchain/DLT, AR/VR
• Cybersecurity, spam
• Consumer Protection: data privacy/protection, cross-border dataflows
• Internet of Things/security
• Identifier Technologies: DOIs, DOA, Unified identity/identifier/locator split
• Over the Top Communications (OTT)
• Other issues: Covid-19 pandemic response, Mobile Financial Services including digital currency

ISOC’s approach is to promote the development of standards that preserve the IWN/Enablers. Their goals include:

• That Internet Ecosystem organizations’ responsibilities are not undermined, nor are the operations of critical Internet resources swept into ITU’s scope of responsibilities
• That ITU proposals do not seek to expand the role of governments in Internet Governance at the expense of the multistakeholder Internet governance model
• That there are no changes to the ITU-T or study group structure that provides a policy or governance role that undermines the policy or governance role of Internet organizations
• That ITU-T standardization activities are contained in areas such as the ITRs, Internet related resolutions
• To strengthen ITU collaboration with SDOs, particularly the IETF
• To see greater openness and transparency in ITU standards process
• To position ISOC as a steady source of reliable technical and policy source of information

Possible actions for ISOC include:

• Engaging “countries in the middle” to convince them of the value of the current standards development process for Internet related technologies
• Joining forces with other standards bodies such as IEEE to leverage our advocacy and work together on common messaging
• Avoiding that any intergovernmental process challenges the current standards development process as the result of one of its negotiations.

Olaf Kolkman noted that OpenStand (https://open-stand.org/) might be helpful for this process. OpenStand was originally developed for WCIT 2012 and has since gone dormant, but it might be useful to revive and update.

Jari Arkko advised caution about reviving OpenStand, noting that the lack of IETF community engagement when originally coming up with those principles led many to question their validity.

The IAB agreed that it would be good to get a team of people from ISOC and the IAB together to agree on some high-level guidelines about how ISOC can talk about IETF at WTSA. Deborah Brungard and Jiankang Yao volunteered to participate. The IAB will coordinate this on the mailing list and set up some offline meetings.

3. IAB Open Meeting at IETF 112

This topic was deferred to email.

4. draft-iab-use-it-or-lose-it

The IAB approved publication of draft-iab-use-it-or-lose-it as an Informational document on the IAB Stream pending edits to be made by Martin Thomson. Once those edits have been made, Cindy Morgan will send the document to the RFC Editor.

5. Giving Feedback to the IESG on charters for new WGs

This topic was deferred to the IAB Business Meeting on 2021-10-20.

6. Next IAB Meeting

The next IAB Meeting will be on 2021-10-20 at 1400 UTC.