It's interesting and a little ironic to observe how the IETF has evolved over the last 30 years.<p>Time was, the IETF was more than the standardization effort for the Internet; it was also an intellectual response to the institutional standards body of the day, the CCITT/ITU-T. Where the ITU was bogged down by process, riven by commercial interests and infighting, and unapproachable by researchers, the IETF was animated by "rough consensus and working code".<p>Clearly, in the contest between the ITU-T (CLNP) and IETF (IP), the ITU-T lost.<p>Presumably, many hundreds of people were involved in telecoms standardization at ITU-T. Where do we suppose those people went? Did they just give up on their work? Or did they instead migrate to the IETF? Either way: the IETF functions more like the ITU-T today than like the IETF of 1994. "Standards" are owned by denizens of the IETF process; new functionality unknown to the Internet is specified in standards documents before it's ever implemented, or, better yet, "standardized" in opposition to working code.<p>I'd tentatively suggest that the IETF has served its purpose, and is now at risk of outliving it.