Re: teh IETF's "bad call"

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

On fredag, apr 11, 2003, at 22:50 Europe/Stockholm, Rob Austein wrote:

> What we (probably) did do was (a) drive up the price of
> wiretapping a bit by refusing to help develop robust interoperable
> wiretapping mechanisms, and (b) buy a little time for wider deployment
> of end to end encryption technologies.
It's also the case that the solutions (a) is proprietary and therefore 
maybe not the same from all manufacturers and possibly a bit more 
expensive and (b) if someone want something from a vendor (like this) 
they can _ALWAYS_ ask the vendor for it, pay and market economy will 
play.

If the IETF would have bent backwards here, there would have been 
things which were possibly required by a standard, which for me is 
something completely different from including stuff which someone pays 
for.

I.e. this has nothing to do with this conclusion:

> Bottom line: the notion that
> the Net inherently resists government control is in for a bad decade.
In general, I find governments etc is doing a very bad job being users 
of Internet Technology. In Europe, EU give away tons of money for 
"research". For example around deployment of IPv6.

My view is that the money would have been better spent if it was used 
to get for example IPv6 transport to all websites (etc) the EU uses. 
They would have been the first buyer from ISPs for IPv6. They would 
have been the first big buyer of new equipment for IPv6.

We all know "the first player" pay the big bucks.

Another example is 3G.

If now 3G is so important, and as most governments in Europe have 
cached in big time for 3G, why not _require_ all employees of EU to use 
only a 3G phone from a certain date?

Much better than regulation.

And, I claim it solves also bad decisions (ISO is one example) because 
in some cases the use itself will show it doesn't work.

    paf