not entirely. I was involved in the IETF in the early 90s. At that time the old guard were the sort of second wave of internet designers (Clark, Estrin, Zhang, Cerf, Deering, Jacobsen....not going to pretend to list everyone). They primary worked off of (D)ARPA grants, although some of them them did work at places like Parc, and certainly places like Cisco.
during that time, alot more money was being dumped into this internet thing, and companies realized that if they could get their widget written into internet standards, it would be really good for business.
partially due to that, and partially due to a largely ineffective focus on multicast protocols (PIM, RSVP, etc.), these people became less central over time, and alot of the formative protocol design activity stopped.
just my perspective, but it seems odd that we're still largely stuck in the early 90s protocol-wise. clearly there have been some changes (http3, bar), but not really much considering the relative timespans.
in any case, the point being that corporate involvement in the IETF wasn't a given in the early days, and it hasn't been an unqualified win.
yeah. there are plenty of reasons. I do think the shift to the client(nat)/server(default-free) model did alot of damage. ATM was also a huge suckhole that killed momentum. and I think ISP just stopped listening to what the ietf had to say for the most part.
during that time, alot more money was being dumped into this internet thing, and companies realized that if they could get their widget written into internet standards, it would be really good for business.
partially due to that, and partially due to a largely ineffective focus on multicast protocols (PIM, RSVP, etc.), these people became less central over time, and alot of the formative protocol design activity stopped.
just my perspective, but it seems odd that we're still largely stuck in the early 90s protocol-wise. clearly there have been some changes (http3, bar), but not really much considering the relative timespans.
in any case, the point being that corporate involvement in the IETF wasn't a given in the early days, and it hasn't been an unqualified win.