IETF and Internet Standards
Note: Discussions mentioned by Mike Nelson as part of his overstimulation during the OGM 2025-11-06 call.
What is IETF?
Internet Engineering Task Force - organization that develops and promotes voluntary internet standards
Meeting Week of Call
IETF was meeting during the week of the OGM call, with "lively debates" about:
1. New Authentication System
For digital transactions - details shared in chat
Standard: draft-sbriz-identity-trust-system-04
- Digital identity authentication system
- Based on symmetric exchange
- Doesn't require federation of authentication domains
- Link: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sbriz-identity-trust-system/04/
2. Content Scraping Prevention
Tool to allow websites to prevent content scraping
Working Group: AI Preferences (aipref)
- Standardize how to express preferences
- About content collection for AI
- About processing for AI model development/deployment
- Link: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/aipref/about/
The Dilemma
Mike's framing: "How do you stop a bad person from abusing the openness of the internet while allowing a researcher to span 100,000 websites and search through terabytes of data?"
Examples:
- Bots scraping for social security numbers (bad)
- Researchers analyzing trends across web (good)
- McDonald's preventing Burger King from seeing prices (?)
- Putting "huge demand" on non-profit websites
Chinese Digital Identity
Separate concern: China pushing forward digital identity system with:
- Surveillance built in
- Trying to get multinationals to use it
- Can't go anonymously between services
Mike's Point
These crucial technical decisions happening "below the radar" while everyone focuses on "whether AI will destroy world civilization"
Related Concepts
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