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Comment by aroch | Hacker News Reader

>I think it's pretty ludicrous that so many people are willing to let an advertising company basically re-write the way that every computer on the web talks to each other with very little questioning

I don't think there's very little questioning...in anycase, Google's goal is to deliver ads to you in the most efficient and fastest way possible. The more you browse the web the more Google makes; it's in their interest to develop SPDY/HTTP2.0. So what is wrong with them doing it? IEFT spec drafts are public and they're audited (as SPDY has been).

Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors", its nice and all to say you want the little guy to be a part (and they should be) but it takes quite a bit of man power to develop, draft and finally get ratified a spec.

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Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors"

The core internet protocols we rely on, though, mostly didn't. If you look at the authors of RFCs specifying the widely used standards, nearly all of them were at research institutions: Steve Crocker was at UCLA then ARPA; Vint Cerf was at UCLA, then Stanford, then ARPA; Bob Kahn was at ARPA; Jon Postel was at UCLA then USC; Paul Mockapetris was at UC Irvine; Abhay Bhushan was at MIT; Tim Berners-Lee was at CERN then MIT.

Not sure if that's good or bad, but it seems to have been uncommon until recently for internet protocols to come from vendors.

edit: I did think of one important one, IPv6. Steve Deering was at Stanford, then Xerox PARC, then Cisco, and IPv6 came out during his Xerox/Cisco period. Bob Hinden was at Ipsilon Networks, then Nokia.

Don't forget Dave Clark, who at MIT, and is the chief architect of TCP itself.

it seems to have been uncommon until recently for internet protocols to come from vendors

Sorry, that's been going on for quite a while now. Cases in point: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3768 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5077 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2637 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2281 (these are just examples, there are many more citing Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia, Google, etc.)

> IEFT [sic] spec drafts are public and they're audited (as SPDY has been).

Absolutely. But there's more than one kind of control. I don't think enough programmers understand the effects of social control. If the standards are all public and audited, but only employees of Apple, Google, and Microsoft have the time and energy to keep up with discussions, well...

And, of course, I'm not imply that _only_ that is true, I just fear that big organizations are dominating the discussion. I have more free time than the vast majority of programmers, are subscribed to the HTTP 2.0 mailing list, and find it hard to keep up.

> IEFT spec drafts are public and they're audited (as SPDY has been). > Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors", its nice and all to say you want the little guy to be a part (and they should be) but it takes quite a bit of man power to develop, draft and finally get ratified a spec.

It's especially hard when the call for proposals period of the draft is about 4 months and there happens to be a ready made proposal from a big player at the ready to be agreed on almost immediately. It's nice to say the little guy should be a part, but in this case the little guy mostly heard about it long after it happened.

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