The impact of IETF on the evolution of the Internet

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has a never-ending mission to keep track of the overall evolution of the World Wide Web and follow the demands and requests of the public. In other words, it’s an organization consisting of numerous countries that collaborate with each other to improve the way people experience the Internet. They hold a meeting every year in a different location, all around the world. The reason behind this is pretty simple – the Internet is global, not local. However, the most impressive fact is the number of attendants. Even though people think IETF isn’t much relevant, it’s far from the truth. In fact, they are quite relevant considering they had over 1200 attendees in 2010, which is an impressive number, to say the least.

The number of participants is growing every year. For example, 42 countries participated in Hiroshima in 2009, and 52 countries attended the same seminar a year later. One of the big surprises was the fact that the representatives from the United States weren’t a majority. While the US had 320 attendees, China had 366.

The working groups within IETF

This organization has working groups focused on specific aspects of different areas such as applications, the Internet, operations and management, routing, real-time management, infrastructure, and security and transport area. As we can see, they have dedicated a lot of resources to achieve their goals. In fact, to give you a better insight into the size of this organization, there are over 120 active working groups in these seven areas, which is an impressive number.

Their effectiveness is also high. In the last quarter, IETF issued over a hundred RFCs (Request for Comments.) Bear in mind, every single one of these requests consists of more than three thousand pages of work. The good news is that there are over sixty of these requests already on the way to becoming a standard.

Plans for the future

As we all know, the online world will continue to evolve regardless of our efforts. That said, it’s certainly going to improve on a much faster rate if we invest time, money, and experts to speed up the process. The number of available resources and technologies directly affects the pace of the evolution. Luckily, a lot of experts see the necessity for collaboration, even with the competitors. After all, the most important thing in any business is the customer’s satisfaction.

One of the great things about IETF is their influence on governments and politicians. Instead of restricting and shutting down parts of the Internet, the governments try to find a suitable solution for various problems in IETF’s documents and analysis. The online world is simply too big for the government to ignore it. Also, it’s dynamic and complex which means a lot of people need to tweak and fine-tune things every day, and it’s too much for the government to handle by itself. That’s why we need organizations like these, to help and speed up the growth of modern technology.

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