RASPRG minutes  - IETF123 (Madrid)

Agenda bashing by the chairs.

Speaker 1: Jeffrey Ding (George Washington University). U.S.–China Economic Interdependence Has Not Declined — It Has Standardized!

The research addresses the question of whether U.S.–China economic interdependence is declining from the point of view of standardisation efforts. The work uses real data from the IETF including 3,555 RFCs from the IETF stream, belonging to two periods 2010-2016 and 2017-2024 and corresponding individual co-authorship with their associated affiliation.

The work concludes that despite “splinternet” narratives, standardisation processes have lead to interdependence.
The main finding is that co-authorship networks show increasing U.S.–China connectivity with Chinese organisations more central in IETF collaborations. The work finds no evidence of systematic block collaboration at country level.

Q&A delved into data specifics pointing to potential for data refining (eg, deployment/adoption instead of just published, area-specific...).


Speaker 2: Bryan Newbold (Bluesky). Interoperation in the AT Protocol Ecosystem

AT Protocol (“App Proto”) that enables decentralised social networking is considering brining some elements for standardisation to the IETF. This is due to the growing interest/implementations from independent parties of different elements and the growing number of apps that build atop of them.

The main motivation to standardise is to encourage broader adoption/investment, provide a neutral governance not dependant on Bluesky, and leverage relevant IETF expertise.


This talk follows from a side meeting in this IETF (where there was general support for pursuing IETF path).


Speaker 3: Karim Attoumani Mohamed (ISOC Comoros). Mapping the Gap: Quantifying Barriers to African Participation in IETF Standardization

(note: there were technical issues and the talk run over time with limited Q&A). 

African representation in the IETF is very limited due to many barriers, eg: 
- Geographic: meetings only in Europe, Asia, U.S.; travel cost and visa hurdles.
- Linguistic: English-only documentation; no translation.
- Structural: low awareness in academia, limited industry involvement.

The talk then discusses potential ways to alleviate this (eg, track participation metrics, translation of documents and multilingual summaries, outreach through universities, Internet Society chapters...)