Open letter to Internet Engineering Task Force: Back off Cisco, not all members want to 'play to your tune'

There is growing unrest at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) due to the power that some accuse Cisco of wielding over the global community of network designers, operators, vendors and academics. The open standards IP association was set up to oversee the “evolution" of internet architecture and the "smooth" running of …

[jason_derp]

"Are you prepared to let your tomorrow be dictated by the whims of a single vendor? Where thoughts and ideas are all entirely dictated by one vendor in the routing space? Are you prepared to have your own innovation hampered or otherwise ignored unless you can get the buy in of ONE vendor? Are you ready to admit it?"

[Puts boombox on shoulder and presses play. Linkin Park begins playing. About faces and walks away in slow motion while "Crawling" plays. Everybody cringes.]

[Warm Braw]

Only about 20 years too late.

Perhaps they could publish it as an informational RFC - it's usually the fate of reasonable ideas that have hit a roadblock.

Mind you, the reason that IPv6 addresses are a fixed 128 bits long is not unconnected to the influence Sun had in the IETF at that point and the perceived advantages SPARC would have in handling them. There have always been vested interests and it isn't just cisco. And it isn't just the IETF - ISO standards groups are as bad, or worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

equal opps

Have cisco put on the same list as heuwi just the opposite side so the rest of the world is protected from merkin spying and info harvesting

[Pascal Monett]

"A chair who won't call for adoption of a draft because they don't want it"

Looks like obstruction is the modern basis of American corporate culture. By simply not doing one's job, the whole process stops and it appears there is nothing anyone can do about it. In a company the person can get fired, but in structures like the IETF there is apparently no one with that kind of authority.

I wonder how our society is going to learn to deal with that ?

[EnviableOne]

Failiure of competition

Its all down to the lack of effective competition doing something different with the weight behind it

the rest of the networking vendors wokrk in their specific nieches or get floated around between vendors.

Cisco are stifling inovation and holding up standards, as they can't keep up. they are still promoting 3 tier enterprise networks with chassis at the core ffs.

Great ideas from other vendors like extensions to previous protocols, designed to be extended, that solve issues, and dont need new ASICS or another box in your data centre, wither on the vine, as without the standard definition IETF can provide, the rest of the market can't adopt them in an interoperable way.

[hoola]

Re: Failiure of competition

Cisco have a big (but dwindling revenues) cash bank have had been vigorously lobbying against Huawei for years through the US government. Their arrogance is awful and Cisco appear to have this notion that they simply do not understand why anyone would ever consider buying anything else "It's Cisco, it's expensive so it must be good" is pushed everywhere. It is irrelevant if there are better technologies from other brands, often are lower cost. Everything Cisco touches comes with a huge price tag and even more eye watering support costs.

I don't know if Huawei have back doors in for the Chinese but equally you can have no confidence that any Western companies don't for their own governments.