Cleaning the Attic II: Promoting Marketplace-approved Standards
Futurewei Technologies
Historically, Internet Standards have been characterized by three primary criteria: the specifications are stable, implementations of them have been demonstrated to be interoperable, and they have achieved sufficient deployment to be considered useful. The IETF has developed specific rules for determining whether those criteria have been met, but the rules and their implementation have sometimes not adequately reflected those underlying criteria. The result has been that the application of the rules has not resulted in STDs for all protocols that meet the underlying criteria. This document proposes a process experiment to reclassify standards-track documents whose interoperability and utility have been demonstrated by the fact of deployment and use in products being used by Internet users.