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From: mckenzie@J.BBN.COM (Alex McKenzie)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  DoD Representation at ISO
Message-ID: <8607092318.AA08379@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 9-Jul-86 14:43:13 EDT
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Posted: Wed Jul  9 14:43:13 1986
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John,

1) It is not my experience that ISO is in the habit of "rubber stamping"
standards developed by other groups.  The ECMA proposals for Transport were
extensively modified by input from other groups, ESPECIALLY NBS in the Class 4
portion, following the original ECMA submission in about 1980.  I agree that
IEEE 802 may be rubber-stamped.  I think the others you mentioned have
undergone change and evolution in ISO after initial submission by the other
groups, although I'm not intimately familiar with all of them.

BBN has not been under contract from NBS for participation in the standards
process for about 1.5 years (except Virtual Terminal work, which is also ended,
but more recently) due, as I understand it, to NBS budget constraints.  This is
apparently one of those areas where the current administration believes private
industry will do an adequate job without government support.

NBS has repeatedly insisted on the sole right to distribute documentation
prepared by BBN under NBS contract.  We tried, without success, to change this
several times, since our output was text files stored on ARPANET-accessible
computers.

BBN has, at least sporadically, tried to help inform the ARPANET community.  In
particular, I point with pride to the fact that we manually input the entire
text of substantial ISO documents to make them available as RFCs (892,905,926,
941).  Of course, one can always do more.

In my opinion you are simply wrong when you say that the ISO Transport
protocol was developed "without any significant inputs from the ARPNET world".