
IETF Response to “LS on New IP, Shaping Future Network” - polymorph1sm
https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1677/
======
eqvinox
For the uninitiated, there's a bit of a culture clash going on there in the
background - not between the IETF and the ITU but rather between the Western
groups that have brought up the internet and Chinese groups that are joining
the tables now.

The IETF, ITU, IEEE and similar groups have their "social etiquette" and lots
of unspoken agreements that people learn when starting to interact there, but
the way these things work is not exactly culturally neutral.

This isn't as much of an IETF shutdown of the ITU, rather an IETF shutdown of
a group of Chinese people and companies. The ITU isn't blind to understanding
that the Internet works thanks to the open IETF processes, but the ITU also
has its procedures, and that's how you get these proposals.

If you want to look at similar occurences inside the IETF, there's for example
TTZ:
[https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8099/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8099/)

NB: this isn't the Chinese being "stupid" or anything - it's an impedance
mismatch in culture. It needs to be fixed by all involved. (The particular "LS
on New IP" proposal is obviously stupid, but - such proposals exist at, say,
Cisco, too. They just don't make it out of there. That's the cultural
difference.)

~~~
willis936
On thing I like about the IEEE (and potentially others, I am unfamiliar) is
that the etiquette is not unspoken. It’s written very clearly and spoken out
loud as the rules prior to every daily meeting. Everyone must either agree to
it or leave. You are not allowed to continuously violate etiquette and be
allowed to contribute.

Perhaps the rules are not culturally neutral, but they do maximize mutual
respect, which promotes the ideology of treating every individual at the
meeting equally.

~~~
eqvinox
It's not that much about the etiquette "inside" these orgs, but rather what
happens before and after, i.e. what makes it to the orgs. Cross-copy from my
post below
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777361)):

Another angle to view this from is to consider this a startup.

In US & EU, dumb ideas occasionally turn into startups, then they show up on
crowdfunding (or, worst case, find a dumb VC), and then they die in a fire of
varying gloriousness.

In China, the startup happens inside of Huawei instead. The ideas are equally
dumb, but they don't die as easily, and when they make it out of Huawei they
suddenly have the Huawei name attached and the Chinese government behind it.
And it falls to the ITU, IETF, IEEE, or whomever else to shut it down.

> the ideology of treating every individual at the meeting equally.

Even this turns into a problem. There's several "cringe" drafts each IETF
meeting. Everyone wants to, but noone feels permitted to go up to the
respective authors and tell them they're idiots.

~~~
robjs
A challenge of the IETF generally is that it is very solution-driven. There
are many, many solutions that are proposed per meeting, and the barrier to
proposing a document is very low. This is good for hearing different ideas
(counter to one of the replies that you got below). The challenge is that it
takes /significant/ effort to:

\- Understand whether a solution that is being proposed actually addresses a
problem that a real network or technology system has.

\- Reshape a set of proposals that have already reached "we already
implemented this" into something different.

Both of these challenges require significant investment from the community.
People have to be willing to stand up and critique the drafts (which they do),
but also take the subsequent steps of going to work with these folks to help
them understand how better they might address real gaps, or even to explain
why the ideas aren't going to work in practice. The problem is that for most
technical contributors, this work isn't moving anything forward -- it's more
"good of the Internet" work. My observation is that there are limited cycles
available from the folks in the IETF to do this work, but the number of new
drafts coming in has increased at a rate that out-strips it (source: >15y
working in the IETF routing area in general). Equally, there is limited
support from the folks that employ IETF contributors for doing this work --
would they rather spend time fixing standards that they have customer demand
from, or stopping standards that they probably won't need to ever implement
(and thus have little to no negative affect on them)? These two challenges for
the IETF have really exacerbated the culture clashes there.

Whilst eqvinox's analysis above draws the line at a particular contributing
company, in my experience, this isn't solely the case. If we look at the IPv6
data plane for segment routing being progressed in the SPRING working group,
it has the same hallmarks. A solution was proposed that it wasn't really clear
what the problem it solved was, there was no significant technical debate to
say that it wasn't needed or was harmful ahead of time (6man and spring didn't
see these contributors), and only later down the line - when there was
significant investment of a number of companies in it - was its
implementability, and efficacy discussed. At this point there's zero chance
that this technology will actually be morphed or deprecated (at best there'll
be a competing solution), even if there's no standardisation of it.

Overall - I don't see anything particularly new here, other than another
outlet for the frustration of not necessarily being able to push forward
standards in the Internet industry. The other outlet has been open source - as
we've seen more push towards just running code. Some areas of the IETF have
embraced this one with much more ease (SPDY->HTTP/2.0, QUIC adoption etc.),
but the routing area - with its implementations relevant to quite a small
number of implementing vendors - has been harder to crack. (Source: I work
with a team that took this route, and has really struggled to bring ideas back
into the IETF and have them openly evaluated.)

~~~
kitteh
The IETF is a pita when it comes to the routing area. Operators aren't well
represented there and it's vendors running the show (this is why Randy Bush
calls it the IVTF, and he's right). I am happy to see folks like Job make some
progress there (and a few others), but I lost taste for the pedantry when I
saw real operators asking for decent BGP changes get shot down.

~~~
robjs
Job is definitely managing to make some great progress, which is impressive.
There aren't a huge number of folks that have the time and effort that is
required to push these things through.

I've worked for an operator all the time that I've been in the IETF, and its
definitely pedantry, not-invented-here, and lack of understanding of real
issues that prevents us making significant progress. I personally have had
more than one go at trying to improve IETF<->operator communication, and made
little to no progress.

A much more successful model has been writing code, co-developing it with
other operators and vendors if possible, and then working directly with
vendors to push their implementations. This model self-selects on solutions
that are actually used (because there's non-standards-focused engineers
involved), and rather than worrying about potential edge cases, get to handle
the problems that occur in practice. This is a bit harder to do with changes
that require global scope -- but all technologies we develop now need to
coexist with legacy, so I'm not clear that it's not the best model as we go
forward.

~~~
eqvinox
> A much more successful model has been writing code, co-developing it with
> other operators and vendors if possible, [...]

Indeed. This provides the barrier the IETF lacks, and does so in a pretty nice
way. It may not work all the time, but even if it helps in 90% of cases that's
a great improvement.

------
jimmySixDOF
I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here at all. Standard bodies have,
and will always revolve around the friction of interested parties. I watched
Cisco and Juniper fight tooth and nail over various MPLS rfc’s for years.
Everyone and their mother wants to replace ICANN. How about 110v vs. 220v ???
Nothing is new here and to magnify this story out of proportion and work it
into some greater US/China decoupling framework is not useful unless you
support that agenda to begin with. IPv6 was agreed in 1998 and it took 20
years with many competing proposals to get anywhere. People have been trying
to improve the internet according to their interpretation since there were
bits in wires and this story is just another run of the mill standards body
workgroup tug of war that happens 100x everyday in ISO/IEEE/IETF/Etc…

------
jlgaddis
For those wondering that this is all about, refer to "LS on New IP, Shaping
Future Network" [0] (and the attachments listed there):

\---

> _The September 23-27, 2019 meeting of the ITU-T Telecommunications
> Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG) considered a tutorial and contribution
> presentation on “New IP, Shaping Future Network” proposing to “analyse the
> current challenges and provide a development path for the future network for
> the next decade”._

> _It was noted that the activities proposed could be related to the current
> work of several Study Groups across ITU-T._

> _Please find attached the referenced contribution and tutorial for your
> review, and comment back to TSAG for its consideration ahead of WTSA-20._

\---

The "tutorial" [1] (PPTX) is, well, "interesting"; to pique your interest, it
includes such terms as "space-terrestrial network", "multi-level verification
filtering system", "holographic communication", "multi-semantic addressing",
and, of course, "blockchain"!

\---

[0]:
[https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1653/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1653/)

[1]:
[https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/liaison-2019-0...](https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/liaison-2019-09-30-itu-
t-tsag-ietf-iab-ls-on-new-ip-shaping-future-network-attachment-3.pptx)

~~~
jojo2000
Seems like few people really read the stuff.

One sentence made me choke :

> "The network needs to provide specific QoS and security policies based on
> user identity, rather than mapping to something instead"

Well, no, sorry. It's an orwellian design proposal.

~~~
temac
It depends, but I agree that this is a crazy hard problem to address correctly
_and_ not create dystopian side effects or even just risk that.

Imagine you need some QoS on a few streams for serious and useful purposes
(telesurgery comes to mind). Core networks are able to provide that, but this
is not usually mapped to user extensible protocols on general purpose/public
access points.

Now there are indirect advantages in just _not_ providing those, because:

\- you _also_ reduce the risk of dystopian usage / restriction of usage / etc.

\- in some cases, you make mass-applications being developed for non-QoS
networks instead, so you eventually end-up (maybe a few years behind, but this
is a cost I'm willing to pay) with basically the same service on a simpler and
less dependent to political context tech.

But:

\- in the context of a benevolent legislation, this could be actually more
useful and fair than the current situation, where network neutrality has
became half a myth both in theory and in practice (there is no practical
neutrality anymore when you can just put your own private datacenters all over
the world plus high bandwidth links to supposed neutral providers, then use
that to push your proprietary services/applications without emerging/low
capital competition able to do the same)

\- so you actually depend on private parties to be benevolent with the
supposedly "best effort" but actually not anymore approach

\- and then it is a matter of taste, but in some part of the world I'm more
inclined to trust elected politics (even if they sometimes do some bullshit)
defining regulation than private soulless multinationals with the often stated
theory that they _must_ optimize shareholder outcome and nothing else.

That being said, given both the current state of the world (and even if it was
better, the always persistant risk of it degrading) and the practical
difficulty to cleverly and benevolently regulate fast moving technical fields,
I'm willing to stick to basically the current situation, which seems _less_
prone to extreme situation.

But it would be a mistake to view authenticated QoS as inevitably and purely
evil.

~~~
salawat
I beg to differ. It's the authenticated part that's the problem. That assumes
you're tracking every connection to perfect granularity. Are you going to
change the QoS for each host? Are you going to enforce every host to
authenticate to determine which tier of service they are provided?

You want QoS? Fine. Provision your network for it, let everyone enjoy it. As
soon as you start putting levers in place to pick who gets the better service
tier, you get crap like Verizon throttling essential services right when
they're needed the most because someone decided that their bloody contract
wasn't looking like they were getting fleeced enough while said service is
trying to ensure the damn countryside isn't completely burnt down.

Once the mechanism is in place it'll get abused, because their is always a
buck to be made by doing so, or an ideological ambition to be realized.
Sometimes it's just better not to even open that damn door. DPI and traffic
shaping be damned.

------
amacbride
This is a piece of art: the most polite and well-researched STFU I have ever
seen.

A gem: “We also note that any real-time systems requiring sub-millisecond
latency inevitably have limited scope because of the constraints of the speed
of light.”

------
chx
To understand better what's going on, you need to check
[https://www.state.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2020/02/USCIB-508.p...](https://www.state.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2020/02/USCIB-508.pdf) and
[https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/liaison-2019-0...](https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/liaison-2019-09-30-itu-
t-tsag-ietf-iab-ls-on-new-ip-shaping-future-network-attachment-2.docx) and
then you will understand what's this about: China wants to abuse the ITU-T to
design a new Internet.

> Source: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (China), China Mobile Communications
> Corporation, China Unicom, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
> (MIIT)

> Title: “New IP, Shaping Future Network”: Propose to initiate the discussion
> of strategy transformation for ITU-T

The US Council For International Business answers:

> In recent years, however, the T-Sector’s workstream has expanded into areas
> in which we do not believe the ITU has the expertise or mandate

> In general, we urge the U.S. Government to [...] advocate against
> Resolutions that would [...] broaden the scope of the ITU’s consideration of
> such technologies into domains such as ethics, R&D, and/or human rights.;

Reading the spin at [https://www.lightwaveonline.com/optical-
tech/article/1664896...](https://www.lightwaveonline.com/optical-
tech/article/16648964/itu-opens-new-channels-of-communication) I am not sure
how far fetched would it be to say that China is bribing the ITU
Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group so eventually it can shake
off the US yoke on such standards. Because this spiel basically casts the US
in bad light and very diligently omits even the mention of China. As
[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-14540-8_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-14540-8_5)
mentions "according to many observers, economic globalisation and the
liberalisation of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image
of the United States" although this paper argues against the hegemonic U.S.
control of the internet, there can be little doubt China would love to strip
away that control be it hegemonic or not.

~~~
eqvinox
> China wants to abuse the ITU-T to design a new Internet.

No. Chinese companies are trying to get recognized and running headfirst into
a brick wall.

Designing a new internet is counterproductive to Chinese international sales
of telco equipment and therefore also to building Chinese influence. And as
far as domestic internet is concerned, they have a pretty firm handle on that
already, without designing a new one.

~~~
eqvinox
P.S.: Another angle to view this from is to consider this a startup.

In US & EU, dumb ideas occasionally turn into startups, then they show up on
crowdfunding (or, worst case, find a dumb VC), and then they die in a fire of
varying gloriousness.

In China, the startup happens inside of Huawei instead. The ideas are equally
dumb, but they don't die as easily, and when they make it out of Huawei they
suddenly have the Huawei name attached and the Chinese government behind it.
And it falls to the ITU, IETF, IEEE, or whomever else to shut it down.

Don't get confused by the "Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
(MIIT)" there either. This isn't "state driven." They're just different faces
of the same large blob.

And it's not about subversion either. They can't do that, yet. If you buy
Cisco, Juniper, Ericsson, or Alcatel, and you find a backdoor... you just add
it to the list of backdoors. But if you find a backdoor in Huawei, can you
imagine the shitstorm that's gonna break loose? They seriously can't afford
that. They'd lose not only US & EU sales and influence, but Middle East,
African and South American too. They can start doing that in 10 years maybe,
but not yet.

~~~
throw0101a
> _If you buy Cisco, Juniper, Ericsson, or Alcatel, and you find a backdoor...
> you just add it to the list of backdoors. But if you find a backdoor in
> Huawei, can you imagine the shitstorm that 's gonna break loose?_

There is a saying I ran across at some point:

* The newspapers lie. The government lies. But in a democracy they are not the same lies.

The "problem" with any Chinese company is that this distinction is often hard
to make, whereas in Western countries there is much more independence (though
not perfect, e.g., RSA and Dual_EC_DRBG).

So when there is a backdoor-like situation in a product from a Western company
it is not unreasonable to assume that it is not for nefarious purposes.

~~~
eqvinox
> So when there is a backdoor-like situation in a product from a Western
> company it is not unreasonable to assume that it is not for nefarious
> purposes.

This perception is _exactly_ why you will get backdoors from Western
intelligence services in Western gear, but the Chinese can't pull it off.

It's straight up cognitive dissonance. Western companies are the good guys.
Western intelligence services are the good guys. They wouldn't harm "us"
Westerners, it's gonna be OK... and the manufacturer will keep the
intelligence services in check! We know since Snowden that they broke all the
rules, but still, c'mon, it's not that bad, aight?

But if you find a single thing in a Huawei device that looks remotely like a
backdoor, hell breaks loose. Of course the Chinese state is behind it! You
can't trust them.

And:

> it is not for nefarious purposes.

Please tell me what on earth that purpose would be, for a company to backdoor
their own commercial product. Why the f.ck would Cisco or Juniper want to
backdoor their customer's networks for their _own_ purposes? Their intent is
to sell shit and "create value"! Backdooring your products does nothing to get
either of these, but it can very much trash a whole product line.

It's sad, but social signaling and valuation causes its exact opposite in this
case. Edward Snowden's achievement wasn't revealing that NSA backdoors exist -
people knew that before, but it was "tinfoil hat" country. Now it's common
accepted knowledge. Unfortunately, that knowledge hasn't led to change just
yet...

~~~
throw0101a
> This perception is exactly why you will get backdoors from Western
> intelligence services in Western gear, but the Chinese can't pull it off.

Western people go after Western companies for backdoors just as harshly as
they go after Chinese companies. See the paranoia about the "NSA_KEY"
variable. See people going after RSA for their RNG.

> It's straight up cognitive dissonance. Western companies are the good guys.
> Western intelligence services are the good guys.

No, it's because Western companies are, generally speaking, more independent
of Western intelligence. Heck, Western companies actively work against Western
intelligence: how much effort did Google expend in encrypting intra-DC links
after the NSA's glass-tapping program went public? How much effort is Apple
putting into crypto on their various devices?

------
est
ITU has been china's puppet for years. Fenghuo(Fiberhome) start this Y.2770
crap named "Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation
Networks" back in 2012.

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57557347-38/u.n-summit-
vot...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57557347-38/u.n-summit-votes-to-
support-internet-eavesdropping/)

> Because Y.2770 is confidential, many details remain opaque. But a document
> (PDF) posted by a Korean standards body describes how network operators will
> be able to identify "embedded digital watermarks in MP3 data," discover
> "copyright protected audio content," find "Jabber messages with Spanish
> text," or "identify uploading BitTorrent users." Jabber is also known as
> XMPP, an instant messaging protocol.

------
misrab
Good (paywalled, unfortunately) article on China using this as a way to move
the infrastructure to depend on Huawei-owned patents so they can cash in on
that work.

[https://www.ft.com/content/ba94c2bc-6e27-11ea-9bca-
bf503995c...](https://www.ft.com/content/ba94c2bc-6e27-11ea-9bca-bf503995cd6f)

~~~
neonate
[http://archive.md/jwQCN](http://archive.md/jwQCN)

------
nirui
Did anybody here actually know the detail about the "New IP" protocol? How it
works?

I can't read the pay-walled ft.com article, but I been hearing people say
"kill-switch" on the topic. If there will be a "kill-switch" builtin in the
protocol, does that means the "New network" will be more centralized and thus
unstable and bad?

I think if the goal is to connect more devices, why not build a completely
decentralized P2P network that is cheap, easy to maintain, and user-friendly?

~~~
geoah
Only thing I can find is this [http://prod-upp-image-
read.ft.com/6f569c60-7045-11ea-89df-41...](http://prod-upp-image-
read.ft.com/6f569c60-7045-11ea-89df-41bea055720b)

~~~
gruez
incompetent redaction strikes again!

The redacted text are visible if you highlight over them.

The left reads as:

>Zhe Chen, Chuang Wang, Guanwen Li, Zhe Lou, Sheng Jiang

>Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

>{chenzhe17, wangchuang, liguanwen, zhe.lou, jiangsheng}@huawei.com

The right reads as

>Alex Galis

>University College London

>a.galis@ucl.ac.uk

------
TanjB
Some of the issues in the original paper are real (except the hologram where
they have transformed marketing hype for stereo images into a real expectation
of transmitting holograms). Pretty much all of them are capable of being
implemented by tunneling through specialized transports, without needing to
replace IPv6. After all, that is the "inter" in internets - you are already
free to have specialized subnets. Cray implements low latency transport for IP
in their supercomputers. You can use a VPN to anonymize your traffic,
including transforming the addressing. And so on. If you step through the
original presentation, everything is something you are free to implement and
make available via IP ports as a subnet.

------
hyperman1
Afaik, the ITU already tried to design a network stack, OSI. And we are very
lucky the world got TCP/IP instead of that monstrosity.

------
kitteh
We can't even get IPv6 everywhere after several decades. We'll be dead before
this is a thing (and it won't be).

~~~
gruez
IPv6 deployment was slow because there's no real incentive. There's the
address exhaustion issue, but presumably the cost of buying IP addresses on
the secondary market was lower than the cost of IPv6 deployment. On the other
hand, this proposal does have incentive behind it, if reports about what's in
it are accurate. Authoritarian governments would love having a kill switch and
subscriber identification at the packet level.

------
grandinj
The telecoms companies are still upset that they lost control of the protocols
when IP became ascendant. The last time they tried to take back control was
around 2006 when they came out with the ISO stack, a very awkward clone of
TCP/IP. Speaking as someone who had to work with ITU standards like X.25 and
X.400, I'd rather chew my own toes off then work with anything they come up
with.

~~~
notacoward
I think you mean the OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) stack, and it "came out"
much earlier than 2006. I remember working with it myself in the early 90s.
It's also inaccurate to say it was a clone of TCP/IP since many parts of that
beyond simple packet formats (e.g. congestion control and routing) were still
very much in flux at that time. Innovations were being made on both sides, and
often transferred between the two. This was a time when DECnet and NetWare
were still in use, and they also had their own heritage separate from TCP/IP.
IETF was not the origin of every networking thought ever.

But you're right that this is mostly about telecom folks not getting over
their loss in the circuit-switched vs. packet-switched war, and that chewing
off limbs would be preferable to working with ITU-specific standards again. ;)

------
PaulHoule
Great, we'll be running IPv17 by 2055...

------
drummer
New IP makes me think of New Speak from Orwell's 1984.

