Taking a High-tech Approach to Standards

Force—the primary organization for Internet standards—is experiencing phenomenal growth, which implies a vote of confidence in its approach to standards-making. IETF (www.ietf.org) is similar to the IEEE in that both organizations focus on participation by individual engineers rather than by organizations. Moreover, both organizations strive to ensure that their standards are developed in an open, accessible forum with policies structured to minimize barriers to participation. The IETF compares itself to the IEEE and to other standards-making organizations such as ANSI and ISO while taking pride in the ways in which IETF is unique. One remarkable feature of the IETF standards process is its demand for actual implementations of a standard. In fact, the existence of two independently developed, interoperable implementations of a specification is a firm requirement for the specification to be given draft standard status. A specification destined to become an Internet standard passes through four states: • Internet draft, • proposed standard, • draft standard, and • standard. When there is sufficient interest in developing a standard for a particular area, IETF, like many other standards organizations , forms a working group. The working group begins developing a document called an Internet draft, which is made available by anonymous FTP for informal review and comments for up to six months. As the working group revises the document, the updated Internet draft is posted on the FTP server. When six months pass without an update to a draft, it is automatically dropped from the FTP server to keep inactive Internet drafts off the server. To become a proposed standard, a specification must be nearly complete, represent a rough consensus, and have demonstrated interest from the Internet community. Such interest is gauged by working group members' attendance at meetings, the existence of a prototype implementation, and other factors. The Internet Engineering Steering Group, an IETF steering committee made up of IETF area directors, must approve a specification as a proposed standard. Though it is not required, IETF recommends that there be a working prototype implementation of the specification before it becomes a proposed standard. Once it has become a proposed standard, a specification is assigned one of the familiar request-for-comments (RFC) document numbers. (A URL for the index of RFCs is included at the end of this article.) The IETF has produced more than 2,000 RFC documents. For a specification to move from proposed standard to draft standard, at least …