IAB Statement on Submitting Appeals to the IAB

As part of the IETF’s Internet standards process, the IAB has responsibilities for handling appeals. This statement describes the requirements and expectations for submitting an appeal to the IAB.

All appeals submitted to the IAB are required to include the:

1.1. specific action or decision undertaken by IESG being appealed;

1.2. grounds on which the appeal is based; and

1.3. remedy sought by the complainant(s).

All appeals submitted to the IAB are required to be:

2.1. written in English.

2.2. submitted in a text format suitable for directly posting to the IETF Datatracker, which currently accepts plain text and Markdown.

2.3. initiated within two months of the public knowledge of the action or decision being challenged as per RFC 2026.

2.4. self-contained, i.e., all necessary details of the appeal must be included in the submitted text . The appeal text may contain URLs to IETF websites (e.g., *.ietf.org and *.rfc-editor.org), IANA websites (e.g., *.iana.org) and external resources explicitly agreed to by the IETF or the Working Group for the activity under appeal (e.g., YouTube, a GitHub project). URLs to non-IETF websites and resources may be included, but they must be informative, providing only background or historical information. It must be possible to process the appeal without reading them. Other attachments will be ignored and not considered as part of the submitted appeal.

2.5. concise, i.e., when background information is necessary for context, it should be clearly separated from the required information (as outlined above). Extraneous information should be omitted; egregiously verbose appeals will not be processed.

The IAB will handle appeals such that:

3.1. appeals are considered contributions to the IETF as described in RFC 5378.

3.2. appeals submitted under conditions that disclaim or limit the applicability of IETF policies, including claims that the policies outlined in the Note Well do not apply and will not be processed.

3.3. appeals that do not meet the requirements listed above will not be processed; in such cases, the public record will include an acknowledgement of receipt with the reason the appeal cannot be processed; and a new appeal that meets the requirements may be submitted until the original deadline or up to 14 days after the IAB’s acknowledgement of the original appeal, whichever is later.

3.4 Once the IAB acknowledges receiving an appeal that meets the requirements, it cannot be revised. If necessary, an appeal may be withdrawn and a new appeal may be filed.

Matters relating to legal issues should be addressed to the IETF Administration LLC at legal@ietf.org.