Complaint to IAB regarding non-transparency (Daniel J. Bernstein) - 2025-10-06
Email: Complaint to IAB regarding non-transparency - 2025-10-07
From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>
Subject: [IAB] Complaint to IAB regarding non-transparency
Date: October 7, 2025 at 2:36:02 AM PDT
To: iab@iab.org
Cc: ietf@ietf.org
Dear IAB:
[Resending since I had accidentally deleted the subject line before,
sorry.]
I am writing to file https://cr.yp.to/2025/20251006-transparency.pdf
with you. For transparency, I am cc'ing ietf@ietf.org, and I request
that you carry out all discussion of this matter as followups in the
same thread on the same public mailing list. This includes, but is not
limited to, any discussions of this matter among IAB members, employees
of IETF Administration LLC, etc.
While this matter originated from events in the TLS WG, it concerns more
general issues of IETF not following its own rules. It also involves
some antitrust considerations, for example mentioning RFC 9680, which
the TLS WG chairs have banned mentioning on their mailing list.
Please let me know if you have any questions. Please note that the P.S.
below also applies to the PDF linked above.
---D. J. Bernstein
P.S. It has come to my attention that IETF LLC believes that anyone
filing a comment, objection, or appeal is engaging in a copyright
giveaway by default, for example allowing IETF LLC to feed that material
into AI systems for manipulation. Specifically, IETF LLC views any such
material as a "Contribution", and believes that WG chairs, IESG, and
other IETF LLC agents are free to modify the material "unless explicitly
disallowed in the notices contained in a Contribution (in the form
specified by the Legend Instructions)". I am hereby explicitly
disallowing such modifications. Regarding "form", my understanding is
that "Legend Instructions" currently refers to the portion of
saying that the situation that "the Contributor does not wish to allow
modifications nor to allow publication as an RFC" must be expressed in
the following form: "This document may not be modified, and derivative
works of it may not be created, and it may not be published except as an
Internet-Draft". That expression hereby applies to this email.
I'm fine with redistribution of copies of this message. There are no
confidentiality restrictions on this message. The issue here is with
modifications, not with dissemination.
For other people concerned about what IETF LLC is doing: Feel free to
copy this postscript into your own messages. If you're preparing text
for an IETF standard, it's legitimate for IETF LLC to insist on being
allowed to modify the text; but if you're just filing comments then
there's no reason for this.