The Internet Engineering Task Force turns its collective hand to the technical housekeeping that keeps the internet's sprawling conglomeration of interconnected networks functional, writes Karlin Lillington

THE INTERNET Engineering Task Force (www.ietf. org) has a rather unique approach to its chore of making sure that when you go online, day by day, hour by hour, the internet just works.

"Getting an agreement that makes everyone equally unhappy" is how Russell Housley describes it somewhat - but not entirely - tongue in cheek.

Anyone familiar with the expression that managing developers is like herding cats will know what he means. Housley, an internet security expert who has worked on many of the net's security standards, is chair of the task force, an international organisation which has no formal structure.

At three annual meetings open to anyone who wants to come along - and in Dublin last week, 1,200 people showed up from all corners of the Earth - the task force turns its collective hand to the technical housekeeping that keeps the internet's sprawling conglomeration of interconnected networks functional.

"The internet works because people choose to make it work. They collaborate to make it work - which is what we are doing here," he says.

About 1.5 billion internet users - with more streaming online every day - depend on the technical standards agreed upon within the task force's 115 working groups, says Gerard Ross, communications manager for its sister organisation, the Internet Society.

It manages legal and some organisational issues for the task force, though its own focus is the social and political aspects of the net.

Unsurprisingly, getting consensus among 1,200 participants does not mean universal happiness or highly specific solutions, but what Internet Architecture Board chairman Olaf Kolkman calls "a rough consensus on code".

"We don't actually all need to agree on details," he says. "It's more important that things need to be able to run and work together."

Most of the contention arises during arguments over which features should be incorporated into standards rather than the selection of basic standards themselves.

The system for working out standards is very orderly, despite the lack of a task force management team or board, the technologists say. Each of the 115 working groups has a chair who determines the order of business for the group at meetings like the one that packed out the Citywest Hotel last week.

Many proto-working groups operate at the fringe of the organisation. If the group's focus is seen as an important new issue by members, it will become a formal working group. Groups only exist as long as is needed to solve a problem, Housley says. New issues that don't fit within an existing working group are first discussed in "BOFs" - "birds of a feather" meetings that bring together other individuals interested in the topic.

Anyone attending an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting can decide to go to a working group's session, but all new attendees are expected to go to initial briefings and attend any needed technical workshops at the start of the week.

One of the top issues on the agenda last week included managing the demand for bandwidth that has arisen from the explosion in internet users uploading and downloading video, and using peer-to-peer networks for sending large files.

Leslie Daigle, chief internet technology officer for the Internet Society, says that contrary to what many internet users might think, the issue is not whether the internet has the capacity to handle the bandwidth - it does, she says.

The real question is whether internet service providers and other gatekeepers of the internet will switch to using technical specifications that would enable all that bandwidth to be managed more efficiently.

The problem of implementation underlies all task force recommendations. If those managing the internet's millions of networks don't move to adopt a recommended standard, then its job is to find a new solution around that problem, not to try and force adoption, says Daigle.

The issue of adoption - or lack of it - arose when the task force debated the best way to implement a critical new version of internet addressing called IPv6 (internet protocol version 6). It is needed because the number of internet addresses - required by websites, as well as internet users - is running out.

At the moment, effectively two versions of the internet are running side by side, with some problems getting the two - the old version and the new IPv6 version - to talk to each other. A two-hour general session for all members was devoted to discussing this important issue.

Participants attend as individuals and do not come as representatives of their organisations, says Daigle, but the world's leading technology companies and organisations had top technologists at the event.

In addition, many of the net's pioneers wandered the floor, including Vint Cerf, who with Bob Kahn came up with TCP/IP, the crucial protocol that lets all the internet's computers talk to one another.

With 1,200 members at large, the conference rooms in Citywest appeared chaotic, but in practice, the meeting is a surprisingly well-oiled, self-managed machine.

"The IETF is a fairly loose group of people that is very tightly managed," Kolkman agrees. "We just want to make the internet a better place."