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From: mckenzie@J.BBN.COM (Alex McKenzie)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: DoD Representation at ISO
Message-ID: <8607081413.AA14152@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 8-Jul-86 09:30:21 EDT
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Posted: Tue Jul  8 09:30:21 1986
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It might be worth commenting briefly on the amount of representation which the
DoD protocols HAVE had in ISO.  Attendance at ISO meetings is restricted to
individuals who represent recognized NATIONAL standards organizations.  For
most of the OSI work that means ANSI in the US, and as an ANSI representative
in an ISO meeting it is your job to support the ANSI view; if you push some
other view you will not be acredited to attend the next ISO meeting.  As in any
other social/technical/political arena, one has to establish a reputation of
credibility before other members of the group will begin to pay serious
attention to you.  Thus to be effective in ISO, one needs to build up
credibility in ANSI, convince ANSI to adopt your view as the US position, start
going to ISO meetings to build up credibility, and finally convince ISO to
adopt the US position.  Within ANSI there are all sorts of competing pressures,
and similarly within ISO there are all sorts of national positions to be
resolved.

The US National Bureau of Standards (within Dept of Commerce) has had a
long-standing program of attempting to influence the adoption of US national
(ANSI) and international (ISO) standards for data communications which meet the
needs of the US government.  A major factor in the definition of "the needs of
the US government" has been the DoD protocol suite.  The NBS sent
representatives to almost every relevant ANSI and ISO meeting for about 5 years
to push the DoD TCP and IP protocols and, in my opinion, performed a great
national service in doing so.  In spite of the constant stream of complaints in
this mailing list about how the job done was imperfect (and it certainly was
imperfect), I think that the ISO has adopted network and transport protocols
which the TCP/IP community can live (and prosper) with if it wants to.

As far as the IEEE 802 issue is concerned, there was far less DoD input into
this via NBS, on the grounds that TCP/IP is supposed to provide for
interconnection of packet networks built according to arbitrary standards, and
therefore if one has TCP/IP or TP4/Connectionless-network one doesn't need to
constrain the design of individual subnets (like 802.3) to any great degree.

Disclaimer: As program manager of a BBN contract effort for NBS to support the
development of protocol standards, I was heavily involved in the work described
above and may therefore view its results more favorably than others who have
viewed the activity from the sidelines.

Alex McKenzie
BBN