IRTF Meeting Report for IETF-126

Sources: IETF Datatracker agendas and presentation materials; automatically generated meeting minutes. Automatic minutes may contain errors.

This is a report of the IRTF activities at IETF-126 that took place from 18 July 2026 to 24 July 2026 in Vienna. The report covers the Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW), meetings of 14 IRTF research groups and the IRTFOPEN meeting.

About the IRTF

Scientific progress depends on more than producing papers – it depends on building communities that identify important problems, critically evaluate ideas, and refine them through open technical discussion. This is precisely the role of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). Rather than organizing around individual publications, the IRTF is organized around long-lived research groups that bring together researchers, engineers, implementers, operators, and standards experts to collaboratively investigate fundamental Internet challenges. This allows research questions to be explored over years rather than conference review cycles, with ideas continuously tested against implementation experience and operational reality.

At a time when publication volumes are growing rapidly and AI is transforming how research is written, reviewed, and disseminated, sustained technical dialogue and critical scientific exchange are becoming increasingly valuable. The IRTF provides a complementary model: an open international forum where research communities develop long-term research agendas, challenge assumptions, and refine ideas through continuous collaboration. The discussions at IETF-126 once again demonstrated the strength of this approach.

The Internet’s most challenging problems – from AI networking and quantum communications to privacy, sustainability, and Internet architecture – cannot be solved within a single publication cycle. They require sustained collaboration across disciplines, organizations, and communities. The IRTF exists to enable exactly this kind of long-term, open, and technically rigorous collaboration.

Covered meetings

ANRW — ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop

Official ANRW ’26 program · Datatracker materials · Auto-minutes

Workshop summary

ANRW ’26 was a full-day workshop held on Monday of IETF-126. It brought together applied networking research across network management, security and privacy, Internet measurement, and transport and media. The program combined a keynote with peer-reviewed long and short research presentations, providing a bridge between academic work and the engineering and standards communities participating in the IETF and IRTF.

The chairs reported 61 submissions—48 long and 13 short—with 26 accepted contributions comprising 20 long and 6 short papers.

Johanna Ullrich’s keynote, The Internet — A Critical Infrastructure, examined the Internet’s transition into essential infrastructure, its geopolitical and power-grid interdependencies, and the need for more rigorous and reproducible Internet-measurement methods.

Highlighted material

• Chair slides and workshop statistics
• Keynote presentation
• Full workshop program
• All presentation material

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 07:00:00

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 09:30:00

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 12:00:00

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 14:30:00

CFRG — Crypto Forum

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

CFRG - Crypto Forum Research Group
IETF 126 in Vienna

Wednesday July 22, 2026, 09:00-11:00 (UTC+2)

• Notes: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-cfrg

• Chairs: Alexey Melnikov, Stanislav Smyshlyaev, Nick Sullivan

Friday July 24, 2026, 11:30-12:30 (UTC+2)

• Notes: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-cfrg

• Chairs: Alexey Melnikov, Stanislav Smyshlyaev, Nick Sullivan

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-ietf-ipsecme-hybrid-kem-ikev2-frodo
• draft-irtf-cfrg-fiat-shamir
• draft-irtf-cfrg-kemeleon
• draft-irtf-cfrg-rsa-guidance
• draft-longa-cfrg-frodokem
• draft-looker-cfrg-bbs-signatures
• draft-wood-cfrg-rsa-blind-signatures

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for cfrg on 2026-07-22 at 07:00:00

Video recording for cfrg on 2026-07-24 at 09:30:00

Key discussion items

The Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG) met during IETF 126 in Vienna. The session was chaired by Alexey Melnikov and Nick Sullivan, with Stanislav Smyshlyaev participating remotely. The meeting covered administrative updates, including the renewal of the Crypto Review Panel, followed by an open discussion on Post-Quantum (PQ) Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) security considerations. Technical presentations spanned zero-knowledge proofs (Longfellow ZK), hybrid post-quantum password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE), non-separable hybrid signatures (Silithium), asynchronous remote key generation (ARKG), and compact PQ mutual authentication (PQuAKE).

A formal poll was taken regarding the adoption of hybrid PQ/T signatures.

---

Topics covered

• Admin and Document Status
• Open Discussion: PQ KEM Security Considerations
• Longfellow ZK
• Hybrid Post-Quantum Password Authenticated Key Exchange
• Silithium: A Compact, Efficient and Non-Separable Hybrid Signature
• Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (ARKG)
• PQuAKE: Compact Post-Quantum Mutual Authentication for Key Exchange

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Hybrid PAKE Draft Split: Christopher Wood will restructure the hybrid PAKE draft to separate the core cryptographic primitives (for CFRG) from the protocol-specific wire formats (for a future IETF working group / BoF) before initiating an adoption call.
• Longfellow Draft Split: The authors of the Longfellow ZK draft will coordinate with the authors of the Fiat-Shamir draft to integrate the IOP sections and refine the core scheme/parameters document.

---

Next steps

• PQ KEM Security Considerations: The chairs will compile the feedback from the session and initiate a structured discussion on the mailing list regarding the potential adoption of a general-purpose KEM guidance document.
• Hybrid PQ/T Signatures Adoption: Given the split feedback in the session poll, the chairs will take the discussion to the mailing list to determine if and how CFRG should proceed with hybrid signature schemes.
• ARKG Review: The chairs encouraged the WG to read and review draft-nygren-cfrg-arkg on the mailing list to gauge readiness for adoption.

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GAIA — Global Access to the Internet for All

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) IRTF WG
IETF 126, Hybrid

• Date: 23 July 2026
• Time: 07:00 - 09:00 (GMT +2) 120 minutes
• Chairs: Jane Coffin, Kurtis Heimerl, Adisorn Lertsinsrubtavee
  [DataTracker]:

  Agenda

  Welcome, Agenda Bashing, Minutes taker, Note Well, other

Speakers

Additional resources

Other referenced papers and resources

• OFDS Hackathon GitHub repository
• QGIS

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for gaia on 2026-07-23 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The GAIA working group met at IETF 126 to discuss rural backhaul design, community network lifecycle modeling, human-centric methodology in networking research, open fiber data mapping tools, and operational practices for circular device management. The session featured five presentations, detailed architectural discussions on network sustainability, and updates on the group's adopted draft.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Agenda Review
• 2. Next-Generation Wireless Backhaul Design for Rural Areas
• 3. Community Networks Readiness and Maturity Model (CN-RMM)
• 4. Human Methods in Networking Research
• 5. Open Fiber Data Standard (OFDS)
• 6. Operational Practices for Digital Autonomy and Meaningful Connectivity through Circular Management of User and Network Devices

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Circular Management Draft: Leandro Navarro will prepare an updated version of the adopted working group draft (draft-ietf-gaia-operational-practices) to resolve minor issues raised during the review, including alphabetizing definitions, fixing typos, and incorporating security/operational feedback.

---

Next steps

• The working group will continue reviewing the circular device management draft on the mailing list.
• The chairs will coordinate with the Sustain group leadership during future IETF scheduling to prevent concurrent meeting times and minimize scheduling conflicts.

HRPC — Human Rights Protocol Considerations

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Human Rights Protocol Considerations (hrpc) RG
https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/hrpc/about

IETF 126, Vienna
2026-07-20, 1130-1230 local time

• Chairs: Mallory Knodel

Agenda

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-irtf-hrpc-political

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for hrpc on 2026-07-20 at 09:30:00

Key discussion items

The Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC) Research Group met at IETF 126. The session was chaired by Mallory Knodel, with Laura acting as the note-taker.

The meeting featured two primary presentations:

1. Corinne Cath presented research on "CloudRift," exploring how the migration of internet governance organizations to commercial hyperscale cloud networks impacts their public interest missions and technical decentralization.
2. Tim Engelhardt from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) provided an update on technical standards and human rights, highlighting key insights from recent global consultations and upcoming institutional initiatives at the ITU-T.

The session concluded with a discussion on how the HRPC community can better engage the broader IETF to translate human rights considerations into protocol design.

---

Topics covered

• Administrative and Draft Status Updates
• CloudRift: The Impact of Hyperscale Cloud on Internet Governance Organizations
• Technical Standards and Human Rights: OHCHR Update

Conclusions and next steps

Next steps

• Mailing List Discussion: Mallory Knodel and Carolina Caeiro will initiate a thread on the HRPC mailing list to gather ideas on how the research group can more effectively engage the broader IETF on protocol-level human rights considerations.
• Document Access: Follow up on obtaining and sharing the ITU-T human rights checklist contribution through existing IETF/ITU-T sharing agreements.

ICCRG — Internet Congestion Control

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

ICCRG Research Group Agenda - IETF 126
Time and Date
Wednesday July 22, 09:00-11:00 CEST
Location: Park Suite 7
IETF Agenda Link
Links
Meeting chat

Notes

Minutes

Administrivia

Blue sheets / scribe selection / NOTE WELL
Agenda revision

Presentations

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-ietf-tsvwg-fq-pie
• draft-irtf-iccrg-ledbat-plus-plus

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for iccrg on 2026-07-22 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The ICCRG session at IETF 126 featured updates on active research group drafts, reports on congestion control implementations from the IETF 126 Hackathon, and presentations on novel congestion control algorithms and queue management systems. The discussions spanned transport pacing specifications, cumulative SACK extensions for RDMA, queueing-theoretic congestion control updates, disaggregated architectures for LLM inference, and approximate performance isolation mechanisms for heterogeneous network environments.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Welcome, Status, and Chair Slides
• 2. Pacing in Transport Protocols
• 3. Windowless Cumulative SACK Extension for RDMA Retransmission
• 4. Testing Congestion Control and Queue Management Mechanisms - IETF 126 Hackathon Update
• 5. Using a Little’s-Law-Based Queueing-Theoretic Approach for Congestion-Window Updates
• 6. Mooncake - Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Inference
• 7. Managing Congestion Control Heterogeneity on the Internet with Approximate Performance Isolation

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Decision: draft-irtf-iccrg-pacing-02 will proceed to Working Group Last Call (WGLC). Simone Ferlin to initiate the last call on the ICCRG mailing list.

---

Next steps

• QTSDR evaluation: Ndumiso Gasela to publish the NS-3 implementation of QTSDR on GitHub for community testing, particularly focusing on heterogeneous coexistence and network jitter.
• Congestion Control Evaluation Suite: Mohit P. Tahiliani to continue the development of an RFC 9743-compliant congestion control test suite in NS-3 and report back at a future meeting.

ICNRG — Information-Centric Networking

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

ICNRG@IETF126 Agenda

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• ICN-Enabled Adaptive In-Network Computation for Resilient Distributed AI
• ietf126-icnrg-draft-liu-icnrg-cross-domain-compute-discovery-00-slides

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-mosko-icnrg-ccnxchunking

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for icnrg on 2026-07-22 at 14:00:00

Key discussion items

The ICNRG (Information-Centric Networking Research Group) met at IETF 126. The session was co-chaired by Dave Oran and Ryo Yanagida. The meeting featured updates on active research group drafts, followed by six technical research presentations covering ICN integration with SCION, distributed AI computation, routing scalability, NDN access control, and cross-domain compute discovery.

Topics covered

• 1. RG Status and Administration
• 2. ICN+SCION: A Global Name-Based Network Service
• 3. ICN-Enabled Adaptive In-Network Computation for Resilient Distributed AI
• 4. From Map-and-Encap to BIER: Observations on Network Routing Scalability
• 5. Architecting A Scalable Routing System for Named Data Networking
• 6. Open-Source Decentralized Access Control Library for NDN
• 7. Cross-Domain Compute Discovery

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Flick Draft: Authors committed to issuing an updated draft before the IETF 127 meeting in November.
• Interim Meeting Planning: The chairs will poll the mailing list regarding holding an online interim meeting in mid-to-late September to address postponed topics and advance active drafts (including FLIC and the versioning draft).
• NDN Updates: Lixia Zhang committed to posting NDN project updates and coordination announcements more regularly to the ICNRG and ndn-interest mailing lists to improve community synchronization.

---

Next steps

• CCNX Chunking: Move to final publication once the outstanding IRSG administrative review comments are resolved.
• Versioning Draft: Solicit more community reviews on the mailing list to prepare draft-ietf-icnrg-versioning for a future last call.
• Compute Discovery: Encourage discussion on the mailing list regarding the requirements outlined in draft-liu-icnrg-cross-domain-compute-discovery-00.

IRTFOPEN — IRTF Open Meeting

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

IRTFOPEN Meetings at IETF-126
Thursday, 2026-07-23 12:00-14:00 UTC

• Chairs: Dirk Kutscher
  Agenda and

  Presentations

  Notes

  IETF-126 Agenda
  About
  The Applied Networking Research Prize
  (ANRP) is awarded to recognise the best
  recent results in applied networking, interesting new research ideas of
  potential relevance to the Internet standards community, and upcoming
  people that are likely to have an impact on Internet standards and
  technologies, with a particular focus on cases where these people or
  ideas would not otherwise get much exposure or be able to participate in
  the discussion.
  IRTFOPEN Agenda

Speaker bios

Rumaisa Habib

Rumaisa Habib is a 4th year PhD candidate
under the supervision of Zakir Durumeric in the Empirical Security
Research Group at Stanford University. Rumaisa’s primary research focus
is on large scale measurement studies to understand the web beyond the
Western context, and building systems to allow researchers conduct these
studies more efficiently.

Diwen Xue

Diwen Xue is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong
Kong (CUHK). Before joining CUHK, he was a Research Fellow at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research sits at the intersection
of Security & Privacy and Systems & Networks, seeking to understand how
network adversaries behave and to build practical defenses for an
increasingly adversarial Internet. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan and his B.A. from New York University. His work
has been recognized by several awards, including the Internet Defense
Prize and the USENIX Security Distinguished Paper award. His current
research interests include Internet measurement; Traffic analysis &
Obfuscation; and Privacy-enhancing Technologies (PETS).

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for irtfopen on 2026-07-23 at 12:00:00

Key discussion items

The IRTF Open (IRTFOPEN) session at IETF 126 was chaired by Dirk Kutscher. The session featured administrative updates, the formal promotion of two research groups, and presentations from the recipients of the Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP): Rumaisa Habib and Diwen Xue. The session concluded with an update and discussion on the "Networking for AI" side meeting held earlier that week.

---

Topics covered

• 1. IRTF Chair Updates
• 2. Formalizing Dependence of Web Infrastructure
• Discussion & Comments:
• 3. Fingerprinting Deep Packet Inspection Devices by Their Ambiguities
• Discussion & Comments:
• 4. Side Meeting Update: Networking for AI
• Discussion & Comments:

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Research Group Promotions: The proposed research groups sustain (Sustainability) and space (Space Networking) have officially been promoted to active, regular IRTF research groups.

---

Next steps

• Networking for AI Workshop: The second IRTF-associated workshop on Networking for AI will take place at the CoNEXT conference in December 2024.
• Kuala Lumpur Travel Grants: The application cycle for diversity travel grants for IETF 128 (Kuala Lumpur) is scheduled to open in late November 2024.
• AI Group Scoping: The IRTF will continue to refine the scope and gauge community interest for a potential new research group focused on Networking for AI.

MAPRG — Measurement and Analysis for Protocols

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

IRTF maprg agenda for IETF-126 (Vienna)

• Date: Thursday, 23 July 2026, Session IV 16:30-18:30
  IRTF Note Well: https://irtf.org/policies/irtf-note-well-2019-11.pdf

  Agenda

Abstracts

Heads-up Talk: Towards a Common Measurement Framework for Large-Scale libp2p Deployments using CBOR-based Verifiable Telemetry

• Authors: Johanna Moran, Manu Sheel Gupta Abstract:
  Large-scale peer-to-peer systems have evolved from experimental research prototypes into critical Internet infrastructure supporting decentralized storage, content distribution, blockchain consensus, and increasingly autonomous agent-based applications. Networks such as Ethereum, IPFS, Filecoin, Celestia, and other decentralized ecosystems collectively operate hundreds of thousands of nodes across heterogeneous network environments, making them valuable real-world laboratories for protocol measurement and analysis.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Heads-up talk: Measuring OAuth in MCP: Migration from DCR to CIMD

• Authors: Paul Craleton Abstract:
  The Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects AI applications to third-party servers using OAuth 2.1, and its authorization model has driven real-world deployments of open dynamic client onboarding. This talk presents measurement data from this transition across the MCP ecosystem. We show the relative adoption of CIMD versus DCR over time, and compare token refresh success rates between clients using each mechanism, quantifying the user-visible reliability cost of client record purging under DCR.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Feeding the Crawlers: An Experiment in Deliberate Bot Attraction

• Authors: Dan Silvers Abstract:
  As AI training pipelines grow hungrier for fresh data, the crawlers feeding them have grown increasingly aggressive — creating a meaningful measurement problem. We present ACPWB.com , a fictitious company website designed to attract, classify, and measure AI crawler activity through an abundance of synthetic content. This short talk presents the methodology and preliminary findings from this grand experiment, along with some ideas for future exploration.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
A Browser's Perspective: Surprises and Insights from Firefox Networking Telemetry

• Authors: Oskar Mansfeld Abstract:
  Firefox collects anonymized networking telemetry from 200 million monthly active users. A large share of these measurements is directly relevant to maprg and the IETF: congestion control behavior, dns timings, path and connection characteristics, QUIC adoption, protocol evolution and distribution, happy-eyeballs-v3 performance, and more.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Traceroutes

• Authors: Sebastian Kappes (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Tobias Fiebig (TU Wien), Anja Feldmann (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Johannes Zirngibl (Max Planck Institute for Informatics) Abstract:
  Traceroute is an important Internet measurement tool used to infer the Internet’s topology and to identify middleboxes. However, we show that TTL jumps exist on the Internet: some devices rewrite the TTL, often to larger value of up to 255. Based on controlled experiments and public data from RIPE Atlas and CAIDA Ark, we show that at least 47 ASes are impacted by path-impairing devices that rewrite the TTL.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Measuring Deployment Characteristics of Post-Quantum TLS Authentication Mechanisms

• Authors: Nalini Elkins Abstract:
  The transition to post-quantum cryptography introduces multiple deployment choices for TLS authentication, including traditional X.509 certificates using ML-DSA, Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC), and other emerging mechanisms. While the cryptographic properties of these approaches are relatively well understood, there is comparatively little operational evidence to help architects evaluate their practical deployment implications. This presentation describes an active measurement methodology for evaluating post-quantum TLS deployments.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Understanding DNS Dynamics over the Starlink Network

• Authors: Robert Richter, Vaibhav Bajpai (Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam) Abstract:
  Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks have as a viable Internet connectivity option, yet their Domain Name System (DNS) behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents the first dedicated measurement study of DNS performance in the Starlink network. Our measurements reveal that DNS latency in Starlink is predominantly determined by the satellite hop rather than terrestrial routing, with the CGNAT hop (100.64.0.1) accounting for approximately 69 % of total latency in traceroute measurements.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
The Future of DNS Privacy: A Comparison of DNS over QUIC and DNS over HTTP/3.

• Authors: Newton Masinde Abstract:
  Abstract: This study presents a large-scale empirical analysis of DNS-over-Encryption (DoE) protocols, focusing on the adoption, protocol feature support, and impact on webpage loading performance. We conducted measurements across over three thousand DoE resolvers, characterizing their support for features such as session resumption and 0-Round-trip Time (RTT) in DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) and DNS-over-HTTP/3 (DoH/3). Our extensive latency measurements demonstrate that both protocols perform comparably, with DoQ slightly outperforming on average.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Detecting and Characterizing Exposed BGP Routers

• Authors: Shyam Krishna Khadka (University of Twente), Suzan Bayhan (University of Twente), Ralph Holz (University of Twente, University of Münster), Cristian Hesselman (University of Twente, SURF) Abstract:
  RFC 7454 on BGP operations and security recommends that network operators restrict access to TCP port 179, which routers use to receive reachability messages from their peers. This paper presents a detailed insight into this underexplored problem of exposed BGP routers using an Internet-wide TCP scan of port 179. We identify 141,313 IP addresses that accept TCP connections and exchange OPEN messages, corresponding to 20,432 routers across 4,194 Autonomous Systems (ASes).

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Noisy Routers: Investigating the Make-Up of Route Collector Data

• Authors: Ebrima Jaw (University of Twente) Abstract:
  The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a crucial inter-domain routing protocol that uses update messages to enable Autonomous Systems (ASes) to share network reachability information. We identify and characterize high-frequency repeated updates driven by a small fraction of sessions and prefixes.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-ietf-oauth-client-id-metadata-document

Other referenced papers and resources

• https://blog.apnic.net/2026/04/16/noisy-routers-investigating-the-make-up-of-route-collector-data/
• https://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/cnsm/cnsm2025/1571167978.pdf
• https://irtf.org/policies/irtf-note-well-2019-11.pdf
• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-18268-5_10
• https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3705389_1/component/file_3705390/content
• https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/538780291/Exposed_BGP_routers.pdf
• https://robert-richter.me/pdfs/starlink-dns-dynamics-poster.pdf
• https://robert-richter.me/pdfs/starlink-dns-dynamics-presentation.pdf
• https://robert-richter.me/pdfs/starlink-dns-dynamics.pdf
• https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/2026-pam-doq-doh3.pdf

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for maprg on 2026-07-23 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Measurement and Analysis for Protocols Research Group (MAPRG) met at IETF 126. The session was chaired by Dave Plonka and Mirja Kühlewind. It featured ten rapid-fire technical presentations spanning decentralized telemetry, OAuth migrations, crawler traffic dynamics, browser telemetry, routing anomalies, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) deployment, satellite network performance, encrypted DNS protocols, BGP exposures, and BGP routing data quality.

No formal consensus polls were conducted during this session.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Administrative Updates
• 2. Towards a Common Measurement Framework for Large-Scale libp2p Deployments Using CBOR-Based Verifiable Telemetry
• 3. Measuring OAuth in MCP: Migration from DCR to CIMD
• 4. Feeding the Crawlers: An Experiment in Deliberate Bot Attraction
• 5. A Browser's Perspective: Surprises and Insights from Firefox Networking Telemetry
• 6. TTL Jumps
• 7. Measuring Deployment Characteristics of Post-Quantum TLS Authentication Mechanisms
• 8. Understanding DNS Performance over the Starlink Network
• 9. The Future of DNS Privacy: A Comparison of DNS over QUIC and DNS over HTTP/3
• 10. Detecting and Characterizing Exposed BGP Routers
• 11. Noisy Routers: Investigating the Make-Up of Route Collector Data

Conclusions and next steps

Next steps

• PQC Handshake Testing: Nalini Elkins and collaborators will set up test websites to allow enterprise network administrators to measure handshake overheads with various PQC signature algorithm combinations.
• Encrypted DNS Resolution Methodology: The authors of the DNS Privacy study (Newton et al.) will refine their analysis to differentiate recursive from authoritative resolvers and focus on production-grade resolvers.
• Starlink Peering/Transit Studies: The satellite routing community will continue investigating terrestrial egress bottlenecks to help optimize anycast resolver placement near satellite ground stations.

NMRG — Network Management

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

NMRG 88th meeting
IETF 126, Vienna + Online
2026-07-24 09:00-11:00 CEST
RG Chairs

• Jérôme François
• Jéferson Campos Nobre
  RG Secretaries
• Pedro Martinez-Julia
• Xiaohui Xie
  Useful links:
• Materials: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/session/nmrg
• Notes: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-nmrg
• Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/user/ietf/playlists (available post-meeting)
  

  Agenda

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• draft-cxxx-nmrg-ai4ibn-00
• draft-janz-nmrg-naas-agentic-negotiation
• draft-nmop-cui-nkg-gateway-00
• draft-prabhu-nmrg-prompt-schema-llm-00
• draft-wmz-nmrg-agent-ndt-arch-04

Other referenced papers and resources

• GIFT-Eval
• time-series-model

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for nmrg on 2026-07-24 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The Network Management Research Group (NMRG) met at IETF 126. The session focused heavily on the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs), autonomous agents, network digital twins (NDTs), and automated intent-based network management. The group discussed several active internet-drafts and research presentations covering self-supervised closed loops, transformer-based anomaly detection, ontology reconciliation, agentic conflict resolution, intelligent data planes, prompt normalization schemas, and network knowledge graphs.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Administration
• 2. Autosupervised Automation Loop System for Cloud-Native Infrastructures
• 3. Building an Intelligent Network @SURF
• 4. Ontology Reconciliation
• 5. Inter-Agent Conflict Resolution
• 6. NaaS Agentic Negotiation
• 7. Agentic AI for Intent-Based Networking
• 8. Intelligent Data Plane (IDP) Framework
• 9. Normalizing Multi-Vendor Network Inputs for LLM-Assisted Network Management
• 10. Network Digital Twin (NDT) Agent Architecture
• 11. Network Knowledge Graph Gateway

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Feedback on Drafts: The Co-Chairs called for increased community feedback on the mailing list for all presented drafts, specifically:
  • draft-wmz-nmrg-agent-ndt-arch (following the presenter's request for Research Group adoption).
  • draft-prabhu-nmrg-prompt-schema-llm.
  • draft-xu-nmrg-idp-framework.

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Next steps

• AI Ops Mailing List Coordination: Participants interested in Agentic AI, prompt schemas, and ontology reconciliation (including Christopher Janz, Shailesh Prabhu, Laurent Ciavaglia, and Alexander Clemm) will utilize the newly established AI Ops mailing list to coordinate cross-group activities and align agent architectures across NMRG, ANIMA, and NMOP.
• IBN and Autonomic Networking Collaboration: Alexander Clemm and Toerless Eckert will continue seeking practical use cases and industry implementations to incorporate into draft-cxxx-nmrg-ai4ibn.

PANRG — Path Aware Networking RG

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Path Aware Networking Research Group (PANRG) Agenda IETF 126
Tue 21 Jul 2026 - 16:30-18:00 CEST (14:30-16:00 UTC) - Vienna

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for panrg on 2026-07-21 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Path Aware Networking Research Group (PANRG) met at IETF 120 in Vienna, Austria. The session was co-chaired by Jen Linkova and Brian Trammell. Note-taking was led by Ryo Yanagida and Nicola Rustignoli.

The meeting featured presentations on Autonomous System (AS) security profiles and a series of updates on SCION-related research, including the status of the core SCION specification drafts in the Independent Submission (IS) stream, Multipath QUIC over SCION, TCP/IPv6 to Multipath TCP (MPTCP) translation over SCION, and Tailscale integration with SCION. The session concluded with an open floor discussion regarding the future charter and direction of PANRG.

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Topics covered

• 1. Welcome, Administration, and Agenda Bash
• 2. Suggestions for AS Security Profiles for Secure and Resilient Internet Paths
• 3. SCION Specification - IS Process Feedback and Future Work
• 4. Guidelines for QUIC Multipath over SCION — Updates
• 5. Bridging the Gap: Translating TCP/IPv6 to MPTCP/SCION
• 6. Tailscale over SCION
• 7. Future of PANRG Charter and Direction Discussion

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Mailing List Discussion on Charter: The group agreed to transition the scoping and charter discussion to the PANRG mailing list (panrg@irtf.org).
• Action Item: Dave Oran to post his three proposed research questions (Traffic Engineering vs. Endpoint Control, Path Explosion/Equivalence Classes, and Coordinated Action Constraints) to the mailing list.
• Action Item: Colin Perkins to post his feedback regarding drawing a clear boundary between path/traffic properties and user-identity properties to the mailing list.

---

Next steps

• Co-chairs will synthesize the mailing list feedback to draft a potential updated charter for PANRG.
• PANRG will meet at IETF 121 in San Francisco, with several presentations already proposed for the agenda.

PEARG — Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group (PEARG) Agenda - IETF 126
Time and Date
Tuesday 21st Jul, 16:30-18:00 CEST (Tuesday 21st Jul 2026 14:30-16:00 UTC)
IETF Agenda Link
Links
Meeting chat

Notes

Minutes

Blue sheets / scribe selection / NOTE WELL
Update on draft-li-pearg-ciphertext-inference-tool-mcp

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-hardt-email-verification
• draft-li-pearg-ciphertext-inference-tool-mcp

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for pearg on 2026-07-21 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Privacy Enhancing Technologies Research Group (PEARG) session at IETF 126 focused on the modern landscape of online tracking, automated de-anonymization, and emerging architectural privacy challenges. The session featured administrative updates regarding a MASQUE-related draft, followed by three main presentations:

1. Real-Time Bidding (RTB) privacy and security implications.
2. Large-scale online de-anonymization using Large Language Models (LLMs).
3. Client source IP privacy in a post-Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) world.

---

Topics covered

• Chair Updates and Administrative Topics
• Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Privacy
• Discussion:
• Large-Scale Online De-anonymization with LLMs
• Discussion:
• Source Privacy Post-ECH

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• MASQUE Ciphertext Inference Draft: The authors will revise and split the draft. PEARG will adopt the portion containing the privacy analysis and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) applicability evaluation once it is resubmitted.
• Source Privacy Mailing List Thread: The chairs will initiate a dedicated discussion on the PEARG mailing list to scope future research on client source privacy (post-ECH) and determine how specific architectural proposals fit into the group's charter.

---

Next steps

• Community Engagement: Members are encouraged to share "blue sky" ideas on the mailing list regarding community-driven defensive tools to counter LLM-based OSINT and RTB tracking.
• Workshop Proposal: Chairs will gather feedback on the mailing list regarding interest in a specialized workshop covering hyperscaler and AI-driven threats to anonymity.

QIRG — Quantum Internet Research Group

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Agenda

Additional details

1. Administrivia (5 min):

Resolving any online issues

RG update

2. draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture

Abstract : draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture

3. draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch

Abstract : An update on the draft proposing a framework for integrating Quantum Internet services with the current Internet, which the authors believe is close to get ready for last call. The new version includes the introduction of the QUI concept, bridging the gap between the quantum fabric and the service strata, and analysis of how a number of relevant papers in the literature would map to the proposed framework.

4. Building a hybrid infrastructure, combining real and emulated resources

Abstract : We introduce the results regarding hybrid systems, and how they can be used to experiment with service concepts at scale. The current results are basically related to QKD, given the availability of such devices, but there are plans to extend these experiments beyond, as entanglement fabric devices become available.

5. Beyond-QKD Applications of Quantum Networks

Abstract : While quantum memories remain a significant technological frontier, estimated to be a decade away from practical commercialization and deployment, many countries — including most EU member states — are actively deploying long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD) networks using commercially available hardware. This raises an important question: what other applications can leverage the prepare-and-measure or entanglement-generating quantum network hardware built for QKD?

In this talk we will present a literature review including a comprehensive compilation of quantum network applications beyond-QKD that do not rely on quantum memories; each with accessible descriptions, clear hardware requirements, and explicit statements on achievable quantum advantage. We aim to start a conversation between researchers and operators about emerging use cases and deployment pathways for existing quantum technologies.

For more information, see: https://knowledge-bank-972a03.gitlab.io/beyond-qkd/ .

6. EuroQCI standardisation

Abstract : We discuss (upcoming) standardisation efforts for the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI).

7. draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp

Abstract : draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• Exploring hybrid environments to scale quantum-safe networks

Other referenced papers and resources

• https://knowledge-bank-972a03.gitlab.io/beyond-qkd/

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for qirg on 2026-07-21 at 12:00:00

Key discussion items

The Quantum Internet Research Group (QIRG) met at IETF 126 to discuss active research drafts, emulated environments, and near-term quantum networking applications and standardization. The agenda covered updates on three active research group drafts (draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch, draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture, and draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp), alongside presentations on near-term applications beyond Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), hybrid emulation environments, and the European EuroQCI standardization efforts.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Status Update
• 2. Beyond QKD Applications of Near-Term Quantum Networks
• 3. Multiplane Architecture
• 4. Exploring Hybrid Environments to Scale Quantum-Safe Networks
• 5. Quantum Native Architecture
• 6. EuroQCI Standardization
• 7. Quantum Datagram Control Protocol (QDCP)

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch: The chairs determined that the draft is not yet ready for Working Group Last Call (WGLC) due to the significant volume of recent additions.
  • Action Item: Diego Lopez and co-authors to address feedback regarding the "forwarding" terminology, QoS classifications, and optical transport phrasing in a forthcoming -03 revision.
• draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture:
  • Action Item: Sara Mansouri and co-authors to prepare version -02, focusing on refining definitions of boundaries, clarifying classical signaling roles, and addressing feedback from Rodney Van Meter.
• draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp:
  • Action Item: Nevan and Mitel Misra to investigate alternative encoding options (e.g., extensible TLVs), implement IPv6 compatibility, and address protocol formatting feedback on the mailing list.

---

Next steps

• Mailing List: Detailed discussions on the architectural drafts (draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch and draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture) will continue on the mailing list.
• Upcoming Meetings: Active work on the individual drafts is expected to produce updates before the next meeting cycles (IETF 127 in San Francisco / IETF 128 in Kuala Lumpur).

RASPRG — Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes Research Group

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

IETF 126: RASPRG Session
Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes Research Group

• Time: 16:30–18:30
• Chairs: Ignacio Castro, Alvaro Retana
  

  Tentative Agenda

Abstracts and bios

Mark Nottingham — Cloudflare

AI in Standards Participation

Abstract

AI is increasingly used to research, write, and implement Internet standards — and, increasingly, to participate in standards discourse itself. As an assistive technology, it can lower barriers for those facing language or other obstacles. However, it also makes it easy to participate with limited human effort or understanding, straining a community whose value rests on a finite pool of expert attention.
This talk demonstrates ietf-llm , a tool for querying a working group’s or research group’s public record, and uses it to ground a discussion of where AI helps participation, where it harms it, and what norms the IETF and IRTF might adopt in response.

Speaker bio

Mark Nottingham works on Internet and Web standards at Cloudflare. He is a long-time contributor to the IETF and a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

Jaime Jiménez — Ericsson

Analyzing AI Usage in IETF Drafts

Abstract

Forthcoming.

Speaker bio

Jaime Jiménez is a Master Researcher at Ericsson with over 15 years of experience in IoT and Web technologies. He co-chairs the IETF CoRE Working Group, contributing to the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and the device management protocol LwM2M. He is currently developing autonomous generative AI agents, enhancing their reasoning and integration with Web/IoT APIs and real-time data.
Related link: ietf.jaime.win/is-it-ai

Marcelo Santos — Federal Institute of Sertão Pernambucano

From Draft to RFC: Mapping the Mortality of Internet-Drafts across the IETF and IRTF

Abstract

It is well known that most Internet-Drafts never become RFCs. This talk shares early, work-in-progress findings from a study that looks at where in the process drafts tend to stall, using the IETF Datatracker to reconstruct each draft’s lifecycle, including its outcome, authors, affiliations, geography, and process history.
So far, the results suggest that a draft’s fate is shaped largely at one key point: Working Group adoption. Some patterns that appear clear in simple comparisons, such as differences by region, by area, or between the IETF and IRTF, seem to change once adoption is taken into account.
These are preliminary observations rather than firm conclusions, and the analysis is still being refined. The aim of the talk is to share the approach and initial signals, gather feedback, and discuss what they might mean for lowering barriers to entry.

Speaker bio

Marcelo Santos is a Professor and Researcher at the Federal Institute of Sertão Pernambucano, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, with part of his doctoral research carried out at the IBISC Lab, Université d’Évry, France. His work focuses on Internet measurement, community networks, innovation ecosystems, IoT, and applied artificial intelligence. He has been involved in initiatives related to digital inclusion, rural connectivity, and technology-based innovation.

İlke İlhan — RIPE NCC

Community Vitality through RIPE Mailing Lists

Abstract

RIPE mailing lists have been active for over 30 years and have been one of the main communication channels for the RIPE community and the RIPE NCC membership. This analysis looks into mailing list traffic over time, the concentration of participation, the longevity of contributors, and the role of the most popular mailing lists in overall discussion.
The results reflect long-term engagement within the RIPE community and RIPE NCC membership, as seen through the mailing lists.

Speaker bio

İlke İlhan is a Business Data Analyst at the RIPE NCC. Her work focuses primarily on the RIPE NCC membership and the RIPE community.

Colin Perkins — University of Glasgow

Analysing Internet Standards Development Organisation Data
Draft
draft-perkins-analysing-sdo-data

Abstract

This document outlines issues to consider when studying data relating to the Internet standards development ecosystem. It identifies observable components of standards development processes, proposes a taxonomy of possible measurements, and highlights methodological, interpretive, and ethical considerations.
The draft is intended to support a range of uses, including monitoring standards development organisations, evaluating the evolution of technical work, understanding technology deployment, and informing community, leadership, and governance discussions.

Speaker bio

Colin Perkins is a Professor at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are in transport protocols, with a particular focus on transport and signalling for real-time and interactive multimedia, and on improving the way network protocols are designed, implemented, specified, and standardised. He has been active in the IETF and IRTF since 1996, has chaired the AVT, MMUSIC, and RMCAT working groups in the IETF, and served as IRTF Chair from 2019 to 2025. He received his BEng in Electronic Engineering in 1992 and his PhD in 1996, both from the University of York.

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• 3_Marcello_Santos

Other referenced papers and resources

• mailing-list-ai-check

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for rasprg on 2026-07-23 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Research Analysis Standardization Processes Research Group (RASPRG) met at IETF 126. The session focused heavily on the impact and measurement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SDOs, statistical analyses of Internet-Draft lifecycles and community mail archives (RIPE and IETF), and a proposed framework for analyzing data across SDOs. The chairs proposed holding an interim meeting to further explore the policy and technical implications of AI in standards participation, which received strong support from the room.

Topics covered

• Welcome and Introduction
• AI in Standards Participation
• Measuring AI Authorship of IETF Drafts
• Mortality of Internet Drafts
• Community Vitality through RIPE Mailing Lists
• Analysing Internet Standards Data

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

Session Polls

A poll was conducted to gauge interest in holding an interim meeting on AI's impact on the IETF.

• Poll 1: Interested in an AI Interim?
  • Yes: 21
  • No: 0
  • No opinion: 3
  • Total: 61

Action Items

• Chairs to take the AI Interim proposal to the RASPRG mailing list to coordinate dates, agenda topics, and speakers for a virtual interim session.
• Chairs to initiate a mailing list thread regarding the potential adoption of the SDO data analysis draft presented by Colin Perkins.

Next steps

• Community members are encouraged to contribute to Mark Nottingham's LLM skill files and Jaime Jimenez's draft analyzer.
• Further discussion on data cleaning methodologies and tracking cross-platform communication (e.g., GitHub, Slack) to occur on the RASPRG mailing list.

SPACE — Systems and Protocol Aspects for Circumstellar Environments

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Agenda

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for space on 2026-07-21 at 09:00:00

Key discussion items

The proposed SPACE Research Group (SPACE RG) met at IETF 126 to discuss long-term research challenges and architectures for space-based and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). The session was chaired by Yorgos, with support from Nishanth Sastry. The agenda included four invited technical presentations and two group work updates.

Key topics addressed included the exponential growth of planned low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations, real-world uplink constraints and neighbor contention on LEO networks, the specific communication and computing needs of industrial NTN use cases, and routing protocol scalability in highly dynamic space topologies. The group also reviewed draft updates detailing a standard code notation for describing satellite constellations and a comprehensive taxonomy of space research tools and infrastructures.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Administration and Introduction
• 2. Beyond Starlink: Understanding the Coming Waves of LEO Satellite Deployments
• 3. The Limitations of LEO Uplink
• 4. Industrial Communication Services via Non-Terrestrial Networks: Requirements and Challenges
• 5. Towards Standardized Routing for LEO Satellite Networks: A Comparative Study
• 6. Draft update: A Code to Describe Satellite Constellations
• 7. Draft update: A Typology of Space Research Infrastructures

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• No formal standardization or consensus decisions were made, in line with the group's status as a proposed Research Group (RG).

---

Next steps

1. Constellation Notation Draft: The authors of draft-piraux-space-constellation-code invite community feedback on the CDDL schemas and general taxonomy on GitHub or the SPACE mailing list.
2. Space Typology Draft: Nishanth Sastry and Juan A. Fraire will publish the initial draft of the space research infrastructure typology on the mailing list and invite researchers to review and submit pull requests to populate the tool registry.
3. Interim Meeting: The Chairs plan to organize a virtual interim meeting in the fall (separate from the scheduled IETF meetings) to continue technical discussions. Details will be announced on the mailing list.

SUSTAIN — Sustainability and the Internet

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

SUSTAIN RG Agenda -- IETF 126 (Vienna & Online)
Datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/sustain/about/
ICS: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/session/35566.ics
SUSTAIN RG session: THURSDAY, 23 July, 2026 -- Session I

• When: 09:00 - 11:00 Vienna (09:00 - 11:00 UTC)
• Chairs: Ali Rezaki, Eve Schooler, Michael Welzl
• Materials: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/session/sustain
  Note taking: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-sustain
• Chat: https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/sustain
• Recording: (YouTube available post session)
  REMINDER to Presenters: the duration times include Q&A

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• Report from Passau workshop - part 1
• Report from Passau workshop - part 2 (Dirk Kutscher)

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for sustain on 2026-07-23 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The SUSTAIN (Sustainability at the Internet) Research Group met at IETF 126. This session marked its transition from a proposed research group to an officially approved IRTF Research Group. The meeting featured presentations on carbon-aware DNS server selection, flow-level network carbon footprint measurements, dynamic frequency scaling for network switches, environmental dimensions beyond carbon, and a proposed "sustainability" well-known URI. The session concluded with a comprehensive report from the pre-IETF Passau workshop, which investigated the intersection of the Internet and the electricity grid.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Welcome and RG Status Update
• 2. Leveraging DNS for Carbon Aware Server Selection
• 3. From Measurement to Emissions: Assessing the Carbon Footprint of Traffic Flows
• 4. NetFridgeS: Enabling Dynamic Frequency Scaling on Network Switches through Carbon-Aware Routing
• 5. Draft Beyond Carbon
• 6. The 'sustainability' Well-Known URI - draft-besleaga-sustainability-wellknown
• 7. Report from Passau Workshop

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• RG Status: The SUSTAIN Research Group is officially approved by the IRTF (moving from "proposed" status).
• Librarian Appointment: Hesham El Bakoury is designated as the official RG Librarian.
• Beyond Carbon Draft (draft-knodel-eimpact-beyond-carbon): Authors will update the draft to incorporate concrete research directions and questions to align with the research mandate of the SUSTAIN RG. Laura Soares will contribute Global South perspective citations.
• Well-Known URI Draft (draft-besleaga-sustainability-wellknown): Determined to be an engineering standard rather than a research document. The author will pivot the draft toward the Independent Submission Stream or the GREEN Working Group, and investigate Yang modeling.

---

Next steps

• Passau Workshop Report: The workshop organizers will compile and publish a formal workshop report.
• Passau Workshop Slides: The chairs will upload the workshop presentation slides to the SUSTAIN website/wiki.
• Mailing List Discussions: Technical discussions on carbon-aware DNS, flow-level metrics, and the environmental impacts beyond carbon will continue on the SUSTAIN mailing list.

T2TRG — Thing-to-Thing

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

T2TRG face-to-face/hybrid summary meeting at IETF 126, Vienna.
Planned scope: the role of IETF IoT technologies in enabling AI agent interaction with IoT environments.
Draft agenda:

Latest agenda at https://github.com/t2trg/2026-ietf126/tree/main#draft-agenda

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• DAWN BoF
• corneo-sildes

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-irtf-t2trg-secure-bootstrapping
• draft-lynn-t2trg-model-rest-apis
• draft-mattsson-t2trg-amplification-attacks
• draft-t2trg-idevid-considerations

Other referenced papers and resources

• https://github.com/t2trg/2026-ietf126/tree/main#draft-agenda

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for t2trg on 2026-07-20 at 12:00:00

Key discussion items

The Thing-to-Thing Research Group (T2TRG) met at IETF 126 to discuss the role of IETF IoT technologies in enabling AI agent interactions with IoT environments. The session covered administrative updates, active drafts, and five main presentations focusing on two key themes: discovery mechanisms for AI agents and enhancements to the device interaction stack (specifically CoAP and SDF). The meeting concluded with an invited, thought-provoking presentation on the systemic risks and complexities introduced by relying on AI-driven abstraction layers in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Administrivia & Document Status
• 2. DAWN BoF: Discovery of Agent Workloads & Named Entities
• 3. A Survey of AI Agent Discovery Mechanisms
• 4. LLM-Assisted Translation Between YANG and IoT Data Representations
• 5. Enabling AI Agents on the IoT Stack: CoAP and SDF Enhancements
• 6. When the Tower Crumbles: Losing the End-to-End Language with the Tower of AI

Conclusions and next steps

Next steps

• Interim Meetings: T2TRG plans to schedule interim virtual meetings after the summer break to accommodate presentations that could not fit into the IETF 126 agenda.
• Document Reviews: Members are encouraged to review the active RG drafts currently prepping for last calls (Guidance for RESTful design for IoT and Terminology and processes for initial security of IoT devices).

The IETF has recently published an interview with me on the IETF Blog.

The Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) met at IETF-119 in Brisbane. Here is my quick summary of the meeting:

Agenda:

1	ICNRG Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates	Chairs
2	Secure Web Objects and Transactions	Dirk Kutscher
3	Transaction Manifests	Marc Mosko
4	Vanadium: Secure, Distributed Applications	Marc Mosko
5	Global vs. Scoped Namespaces	Marc Mosko

---

---

Meeting material:

• All presentation material
• Meeting minutes
• Meeting video

ICNRG Status

ICNRG recently published four news RFCs – great achievement by all involved authors and the whole group!

• RFC 9510: Alternative Delta Time Encoding for Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) Using Compact Floating-Point Arithmetic
• RFC 9531: Path Steering in Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) and Named Data Networking (NDN)
• RFC 9508: Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Ping Protocol Specification
• RFC 9507: Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Traceroute Protocol Specification

See my blog posting for a more detailed description.

Secure Web Objects and Transactions

One focus of this meeting was transactions in ICN, i.e., interactions with the intention to achieve some durable state change at a remote peer – which imposes some challenges in a system that is designed around accessing named data.

In my presentation I talked about different ways to realize transactions in ICN:

1. ICN as a network layer
   • Client-server communication between two nodes
   • Implement transaction semantics on top of an ICN messaging service
2. Recording state changes in shared data structures
   • Shared namespace, potentially functioning as a transaction ledger
   • Still need to think about atomicity etc

For 1) transactions as messaging over ICN networks, the following considerations apply:

• Client-server communication between two nodes
• Implement transaction semantics on top of an ICN messaging service
• Different approaches
  • A: Traditional layering: Using NDN-like systems as a messaging layer
  • Assign prefixes to client & servers
  • Send messages back and forth, and implement reliability and transactions semantics on top
  • B: ICN-native communication: Use Interest-Data as request-response abstraction for transactions
  • Mapping transaction communication and state evolution more directly to ICN, e.g., Interest-Data in NDN
  • Collapsing traditional network, transport, application layer functions

I mainly talked about variant 1B, ICN-native communication: Use InterestData as request-response abstraction for transactions and introduced the idea of "Secure Web Objects" (SWOs) for a data-oriened web as a motivation.

In such a system, not everything would be about accessing named data object – there is also a need for "client/server" state evolution, e.g., for online banking and similar use cases.

I introduced some ideas on RESTful ICN that we published in an earlier paper. The Restful ICN proposal leverages Reflexive Forwarding, for robust client-server communication and integrates elements of CCNx key exchange for security context setup and session resumption.

Summarizing, I wanted to initiate a discussion about how to realize transactions in information-centric systems? This discussion is not about mapping ICN to existing protocols, such as HTTP, but about actual distributed computing semantics, i.e., robust session setup and state evolution. Transactions with ICN-native communication are hard to provide with with basic Interest/Data. Reflexive Forwarding + CCNx Key Exchange + transaction semantics are an attempt to provide such a service in a mostly ICN-idiomatic way, with the downside that reflexive forwarding needs extensions to forwarders. This raises question on the minimal feature set of core ICN protocols, and to deal with extensions.

In the discussion, it was pointed out that lots of experience on distributed systems has shown that transactions or secure multi-interactions will generally require more than a single two-way exchange.

Others suggested that ICN and NDN has authentication carried out when the signed interest arrives which directly proves authentication, so that the authentication would in fact be done beforehand.

However, authentication may not be enough. For example, client authorization in client-server communication is a critical function which needs to be carefully designed in real-world networks. For example, forcing a server to do signature verification on initial request arrival has been shown in prior systems (e.g. TCP+TLS) to represent a serious computational DOS attack risk. Reflexive Forwarding in RICE tries to avoid exactly that problem, by enabling the server to iteratively authenticate and authorize clients before committing computing resources.

It was also said that whenever a protocol does authentication. you need to analyze in the context of specific examples to discuss, and that cannot only look at the problem at an abstract level.

Transaction Manifests

Marc Mosko presented another approach to transactions in ICN, called [Transaction Manifests](https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/119/materials/slides-119-icnrg-transaction-manifests-00 "Transaction Manifests "Transaction Manifests"). He explained that ICN can be transactional.

Typically, ICN is considered as a publish/subscribe or pre-publishing of named-data approach. Outside ICN, distributed transactions do exist, especially in DLTs. For example, considering a permissioned DLT with size N and K << N bookkeepers. In a DLT, they base their decision on the block hash history. In this talk, Marc discussed what would be an equivalent function in ICN, and introduced the notion of transaction manifests.

In ICN, there is a technology called FLIC (File-like collections), i.e., manifests for static objects. FLIC describes a single object that is re-constructed by traversing the manifest in order. In Marc's proposal, a transaction manifest describes a set of names that must be considered together. The transaction manifest names likely point to FLIC root manifests.

In the example above, transaction manifest entries entries point directly to objects. For a complete systems, you would also need a set of bookkeepers, e.g., systems like Hyperledger offering global ordering vis bespoke orderer nodes. Such bookkeeper would have to ensure that a transaction has current pre-conditions, current post-conditions, and no conflicts in post-conditions. Transaction manifests are a form of write-ahead logs (WAL), as used in databases, such as PostgreSQL.

Marc went on discussing a few challenges, such as interactions with repositories and caches, as well as distributed transaction manifests.

There was some discussion on the required ordering properties for this approach, i.e., whether, in a multi-bookkeeper system, livelocks and deadlocks could occur – and whether these could resolved without requiring a total order.

Marc is continueing to work on this. One of the next steps would be to design client-to-bookkepper and bookkeeper-to-bookkeeper protocols.

Vanadium: Secure, Distributed Applications

Marc Mosko introduced the Vanadium system, a secure, distributed RPC system based on distributed naming and discovery. Vanadium uses symmetrical authentication and encryption and may use private name discovery with Identity-Based-Encryption (IBE).

Vanadium has two parts:

1. Principals and Blessings and Caveats (Security)
   • Use a hierarchical name, e.g. alice:home:tv.
   • Certificate based
   • Blessings are scoped delegations from one principal to another for a namespace (e.g. alice grants Bob “watch” permissions to the TV)
   • Caveats are restrictions on delegations (e.g. Bob can only watch 6pm – 9pm).
   • 3rd party caveats must be discharged before authorization
   • E.g. revocations or auditing
2. The RPC mount tables (Object Naming)
   • These describe how to locate RPC namespaces
   • They provide relative naming

Vanadium is interesting because parts of its design resemble some ICN concepts, especially the security part:

• It uses prefix matching and encryption
• Namespaces work like groups
• The colon : separates the blesser from the blessed
• Authorizations match extensions.
  • If Alice authorized “read” to alice:hometv to alice:houseguests, and if Bob has a blessing for alice:houseguests:bob, then Bob has “read” to alice:hometv.
• A special terminator :$ only matches the exact prefix.
  • A blessing to alice:houseguest:$ only matches that exact prefix.

Marc then explain the object naming structure and the entity resolution in Vanadium.

More details can be found in Marc's presentation and on Vanadium's web page.

In summary, Vanadium is a permissioned RPC service. A Vanadium name encodes the endpoint plus name suffix. The endpoint does not need to resolve to a single mount table server, it could be any server that possesses an appropriate blessing. Authentication is done via pair-wise key exchange and blessing validations. It can be private if using IBE, otherwise server name leaks. Authorizations and Blessings and Caveats use hierarchical, prefixmatching names.

From an ICN perspective, the security approach seems interesting. Blessings and Caveats and discharges and namespaces as groups. One question is how this differs from SDSI co-signings. The Vanadium identity service provides an interesting mapping of OAuth2 app:email tokens to PKI and blessings. The RPC approach exhibits some differences to ICN, e.g., embedding the endpoint identifier in the name. ICN technologies in this context are public-key scoped names in CCNx and schematized trust anchors in NDN.

In the discusion, it was noted that it would be interesting to do an apples-to-apples comparison to the NDN trust schema approach; Vanadium's approach with the ability to create blessings and caveats on demand seems to be much more granular and dynamic.

Global vs. Scoped Namespaces

Marc Mosko discussed global vs. scoped namespaces. For example, how do you know that the key you are looking at is the key that you should be looking at? IPFS punts that to out-of-band mechanisms. CCNX on the other hand uses public key scoped names; you can put a public key, publisher ID in an interest and say you only wanyt this name if signed with the associated key.

It was suggested to re-visit some of the concepts in the RPC system of OSF distributed computing, where all namespaces were scoped, and name discovery starts out as local. You could then "attach" a local namespace to more global namespace via an explicit "graft" operation. The key here was that the authoritative pointers representing the namespace graph were from child to parent, as opposed to parent to child as it is with systems like DNS. Your local trust root identifier could become a name in a higher layer space, yielding a trust root higher in the hierarchy tha could be used instead of or in addition to your local trust root. Doing this can create progressively more global name spaces out of local ones.

Please check out the meeting video for the complete discussion at the meeting.

In the Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) we have recently published a set of new RFCs:

RFC 9510: Alternative Delta Time Encoding for Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) Using Compact Floating-Point Arithmetic

Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) utilizes delta time for a number of functions. When using CCNx in environments with constrained nodes or bandwidth-constrained networks, it is valuable to have a compressed representation of delta time. In order to do so, either accuracy or dynamic range has to be sacrificed. Since the current uses of delta time do not require both simultaneously, one can consider a logarithmic encoding. This document updates RFC 8609 ( to specify this alternative encoding.

RFC 9531: Path Steering in Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) and Named Data Networking (NDN)

Path steering is a mechanism to discover paths to the producers of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Content Objects and steer subsequent Interest messages along a previously discovered path. It has various uses, including the operation of state-of-the-art multi-path congestion control algorithms and for network measurement and management. This specification derives directly from the design published in https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3125719.3125721 (4th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking) and, therefore, does not recapitulate the design motivations, implementation details, or evaluation of the scheme. However, some technical details are different, and where there are differences, the design documented here is to be considered definitive.

RFC 9508: Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Ping Protocol Specification

This document presents the design of an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Ping protocol. It includes the operations of both the client and the forwarder.

Ascertaining data plane reachability to a destination and taking coarse performance measurements of Round-Trip Time (RTT) are fundamental facilities for network administration and troubleshooting. In IP, where routing and forwarding are based on IP addresses, ICMP Echo Request and ICMP Echo Reply packets are the protocol mechanisms used for this purpose, generally exercised through the familiar ping utility. In Information-Centric Networking (ICN), where routing and forwarding are based on name prefixes, the ability to ascertain the reachability of names is required.

In order to carry out meaningful experimentation and deployment of ICN protocols, new tools analogous to ping and traceroute used for TCP/IP are needed to manage and debug the operation of ICN architectures and protocols. This document describes the design of a management and debugging protocol analogous to the ping protocol of TCP/IP; this new management and debugging protocol will aid the experimental deployment of ICN protocols. As the community continues its experimentation with ICN architectures and protocols, the design of ICN Ping might change accordingly. ICN Ping is designed as a "first line of defense" tool to troubleshoot ICN architectures and protocols. As such, this document is classified as an Experimental RFC. Note that a measurement application is needed to make proper use of ICN Ping in order to compute various statistics, such as average, maximum, and minimum Round-Trip Time (RTT) values, variance in RTTs, and loss rates.

RFC 9507: Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Traceroute Protocol Specification

This document presents the design of an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Traceroute protocol. This includes the operation of both the client and the forwarder.

In TCP/IP, routing and forwarding are based on IP addresses. To ascertain the route to an IP address and to measure the transit delays, the traceroute utility is commonly used. In Information-Centric Networking (ICN), routing and forwarding are based on name prefixes. To this end, the ability to ascertain the characteristics of at least one of the available routes to a name prefix is a fundamental requirement for instrumentation and network management. These characteristics include, among others, route properties such as which forwarders were transited and the delay incurred through forwarding.

In order to carry out meaningful experimentation and deployment of ICN protocols, new tools analogous to ping and traceroute used for TCP/IP are needed to manage and debug the operation of ICN architectures and protocols. This document describes the design of a management and debugging protocol analogous to the traceroute protocol of TCP/IP; this new management and debugging protocol will aid the experimental deployment of ICN protocols. As the community continues its experimentation with ICN architectures and protocols, the design of ICN Traceroute might change accordingly. ICN Traceroute is designed as a tool to troubleshoot ICN architectures and protocols.

On March 15 2024, in the week before the IETF-119 meeting in Brisbane, Zili Meng and I organized the 1st HKUST Internet Research Workshop that brought together researchers in computer networking and systems around the globe to a live forum discussing innovative ideas at their early stages. The workshop took place at HKUST's Clear Water Bay campus in Hong Hong.

We ran the workshop like a “one day Dagstuhl seminar” and focused on discussion and ideas exchange and less on conference-style presentations. The objective was to identify topics and connect like-minded people for potential future collaboration, which worked out really well.

The agenda was:

1. Dirk Kutscher: Networking for Distributed ML
2. Zili Meng: Overview of the Low-Latency Video Delivery Pipeline
3. Jianfei He: The philosophy behind computer networking
4. Carsten Bormann: Towards a device-infrastructure continuum in IoT and OT networks
5. Zili Meng: Network Research – Academia, Industry, or Both?

Dirk Kutscher: Networking for Distributed ML

With the ever-increasing demand for compute power from large-scale machine learning training we have started to realize that not only does Moore's Law no longer address increasing performance demand automatically, but also that the growth rate in terms of training FLOPs for transformers and other large-scale machine learning exhibits by far larger exponential factors.

This has been well illustrated by presentations in an AI data center side meeting at IETF-118, for example by Omer Shabtai who talked about Distributed Training in data centers.

WIth increasing scale, communication over networks becomes a bottleneck, and the question arises, what could be good system designs, protocols, and in-network support strategies to improve performance.

Current distributed machine learning systems typically use a technology called Collective Communication that was developed as a Message Passing Interface (MPI) abstraction for high-performance computing (HPC). Collective Communication is the combination of standardized aggregration and reduction function with communication abstractions, e.g., for "broadcasting" or "unicasting" results.

Collective Communication is implemented a few popular libraries such as OpenMPI and Nvidia's NCCL. When used in IP networks, the communication is usually mapped to iterations of peer-to-peer interactions, e.g., organizing nodes in a ring and sending data for aggregation within such rings. One potential way to achieve better performance would be to perform the aggregation "in the network", as in HPC systems, e.g., using the Scalable hierarchical aggregation protocol (SHArP). Previous work has attempted doing this with P4-based dataplane programming, however such approaches are typically limited due to the mostly stateless operation of the corresponding network elements.

In large-scale training sessions, running over shared infrastructure in multi-tenant data centers, communication needs to respond to congestion, packet loss, server overload etc., i.e., the features of typical transport protocols are needed.

I had previously discussed corresponding challenges and requirements in these Internet Drafts:

• Collective Communication Optimization
• Towards a Unified Transport Protocol for In-Network Computing in Support of RPC-based Applications

In my talk at HKIRW, I discussed ideas for corresponding transport protocols. There are interesting challenges in bringing together reliable communication, congestion control, flow control, single-destination as well multi-destination communication and in-network processing.

Zili Meng: Overview of the Low-Latency Video Delivery Pipeline

Zili talked about requirements for ultra-low latency for interactive streaming for the next-generation of immersive applications. Some application provide really stringent low-latency requirements, with a consistent service quality over many hours, and the talk suggested a better coordination between all elements of the streaming and rendering pipeline.

There was a discussion as to how achievable these requirements are in the Internet and whether applications might be re-designed in terms of providing acceptable user experience even without guaranteed high-bandwidth low-latency service, for example by employing technologies such as semantic communication, prediction, local control loops etc.

Jianfei He: The philosophy behind computer networking

In his talk, Jianfe He asked the question how the field of computer networked can be more precisely defined and how a more systematic could help with the understanding and design of future networked systems.

Specifically, he suggested considering basing design on a solid understanding of potentials and absolute constraints in a certain field, such as Shannon's theory/limit and on the notion of tradeoffs, i.e., consequences of certain design decisions, as represented by the CAP theorem in distributed systems. He mentioned two examples: 1) routing protocols and 2) transport protocols.

For routing protocols, there are well-known tradeoffs between convergence time, scaling limits, and required bandwidths. With changed network properties (bandwidth) – can we reasons about options for shifting the tradeoffs?

For transport protocols, there a goals such as reliability, congestion control etc., and tradeoff relationships between packet loss, line utilization, delay and buffer size. How would designs change if we changed the objective, e.g., to shortest flow completion times or shortest message completion time (or if we looked at collections of flows)? What if we added fairness to these objectives?

Jianfe asked the question whether it was possible to develop these tradeoffs/constraints into a more consistent theory.

Carsten Bormann: Towards a device-infrastructure continuum in IoT and OT networks

Carsten talked about requirements and available technologies for providing a secure management of IoT devices in a device-infrastructure continuum in IoT and OT networks, where scale demands high degrees of automation at run-time and only limited individual device configuration (at installation only). It is no longer possible to manually track each new "Thing" species.

Carsten mentioned technologies such as

• RFC 8250: Manufacturer's Usage Description (MUD);
• W3C Web of Things description model; and
• IETF Semantic Definition Format (SDF).

In his talk, Carsten formulated the goal of "Well-Informed Networking", i.e., an approach where networks can obtain sufficient information about the existing devices, their legitimate communication requirements, and their current status (device health).

Zili Meng: Network Research – Academia, Industry, or Both?

Zili discussed the significance of consistently high numbers industry and industry-only papers at major networking conferences. Often such papers are based on operational experience that can only obtained by companies actually operating corresponding systems.

Sometimes papers seem to get accepted not necessarily on the basis of their technical merits but because they report on "large-scale deployments".

When academics get involved in such work, it is often not in a driving position, but rather through students who work in internship at corresponding companies. Naturally, such papers are not questioning the status quo and are generally not critical of the systems they discuss.

At the workshop, we discussed the changes in the networking research field over the past years, as well as the challenges of successful collaborations between academia and industry.

The emerging term In-Network Computin (INC) [inc] in particular refers applying on-path programmable networking devices (e.g., switches and routers between clients and servers) as an accelerator or function offloader to boost throughput, reduce server load, or improve latency, typically in a well-controlled data center network environment.

Some INC implementations evolved from programmable data plane systems and align with the trend of network programmability at large. In recent year, it has been shown to support many promising applications (e.g., caching, aggregation, and agreement). For example, in distributed machine learning (DML), training nodes produce data (gradients) that needs to be aggregated or reduced -- and the result could be distributed to one or multiple consumers. As another example, the NetClone system [netclone] uses in-network forwarder to replicate RPC invocation messages and to perform more informed forwarding based on observed latencies for accelerating RPC communication.

While it is possible to achieve this kind of operation purely with end-to-end communication between worker nodes, performance can be dramatically improved by offloading both the operation processing and the data dissemination to nodes in the network. These in-network processors are often conceived as semi-transparent performance enhancing on-path elements, i.e., they are not the actual endpoints in transport protocol sessions and would intercept packets with application data and potentially generate new data that they would have to transmit.

In our Internet Draft draft-song-inc-transport-protocol-req-01.txt, we are discussing this problem and are formulating some requirements for the design of future transport protocols in this space.

References

• Collective Communication: Better Network Abstractions for AI
• Computing in the Network – Lessons Learned and New Opportunities
• [I-D.yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases] Yao, K., Shiping, X., Li, Y., Huang, H., and D. KUTSCHER, "Collective Communication Optimization: Problem Statement and Use cases", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00, 23 October 2023, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00.
• [inc] Klenk et al., B., "An In-Network Architecture for Accelerating Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Collectives", ACM/IEEE 47th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2020, <https:dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISCA45697.2020.00085>
• [netclone] Kim, G., "NetClone: Fast, Scalable, and Dynamic Request Cloning for Microsecond-Scale RPCs", In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference (ACM SIGCOMM '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 195-207, 2023 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604820

We have posted the agenda for our DINRG meeting at IETF-118:

Documents

• The Cloud Strikes Back: Investigating the Decentralization of IPFS
• Local-First Software
• draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-03

Logistics

DINRG Meeting at IETF-118 – 2023-11-06, 08:30 to 10:30 UTC

• MeetEcho
• Onsite tool
• Notes
• IETF-118 Agenda

We have submitted two new Internet Drafts on Collective Communication:

1. Kehan Yao , Xu Shiping , Yizhou Li , Hongyi Huang , Dirk Kutscher; Collective Communication Optimization: Problem Statement and Use cases; Internet Draft draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00; work in progress; October 2023

2. Kehan Yao , Xu Shiping , Yizhou Li , Hongyi Huang , Dirk Kutscher; Collective Communication Optimization: Requirement and Analysis; Internet Draft draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-requirement-and-analysis-00; work in progress; October 2023

Collective Communication refers to communication between a group of processes in distributed computing contexts, for example involving interaction types such as broadcast, reduce, all-reduce. This data-oriented communication model is employed by distributed machine learning and other data processing systems, such as stream processing. Current Internet network and transport protocols (and corresponding transport layer security) make it difficult to support these interactions in the network, e.g., for aggregating data on topologically optimal nodes for performance enhancements. These two drafts discuss use cases, problems, and initial ideas for requirements for future system and protocol design for Collective Communication. They will be discussed at IETF-118.

Decentralization of the Internet Research Group at IETF-117

The Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DINRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) had a meeting on 2023-07-27 at the 117th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). DINRG aims to provide for the research and engineering community, both an open forum to discuss the Internet centralization phenomena and associated potential threats, and a platform to facilitate the coordination of efforts in identifying the causes of observed consolidations and the mitigation solutions.

For context, we recently published a workshop report that discusses some fundamental problems: ACM SIGCOMM CCR: Report of 2021 DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the Internet

The DINRG meeting at IETF-117 meeting featured three highly interesting talks by Cory Doctorow, Volker Stocker & William Lehr, and Christian Tschudin that created quite some attention and led to lively discussions during and after the meeting. There is a full meeting recording on youTube, and we have published meeting minutes. Special thanks to Ryo Yanagida, A.J. Stein, and Eve Schooler for taking notes at the meeting.

Cory Doctorow: Let The Platforms Burn: Bringing Back the Good Fire of the Old Internet

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, activist and journalist, talked about a trend in platform evolution that he calls enshittification, where platforms go through different phases after growing user bases quickly as per platform economics and market domination strategies and of locking in users through technical and economic barriers. In advertisement (and digital online market) platforms, the platform operator sits between the users and other companies (so-called "two-sided market" scenarios), where the user base, the obtained personal information and behavioral surveillance results become assets to attracts such companies.

For example, in order to make avertising more effective, social media platforms would increase control of users's timelines, i.e., content that is presented to them, and make it harder for users to leave the platform. Overall this results in negative user experience. For increasing advertisment revenue, platforms would then sell attention more directly, i.e., exploit their position in the advertisement market. See Cory's posting on enshittification for details.

This process and the difficulties in effectively controlling and regulating platform companies, has led to a permanent crisis that Cory compares to a fire hazard situation. Platforms were rocked by scandals private data theft, accidental leaks and intended data sharing with other insitutions etc.

While the computer and networking world has seen a constant emerging and vanishing of "platforms" (operating systems, PC companies, online services) before, the current concentrated tech market makes is impossible to let harmful (or not very user-friendly) dissolve. This is due to network effects (Metcalfe's law) and switching costs, for example when trying to leave a dominant social media platforms and thereby losing connections to friends. This monopoly situation is enabled by a legal environment with ineffective antitrust laws, which has allowed for dominating platform to constantly acquire competing companies and potentially disruptive businesses.

With new laws for content moderation and censorship, platform get even more control over their users (in the name of preventing harrassment), without making in any easier to leave platforms. In his article (and podcast epsidode) called "Let the Platforms Burn", Cory concluded

Platforms collapse "slowly, then all at once." The only way to prevent sudden platform collapse syndrome is to block interoperability so users can't escape the harms of your walled garden without giving up the benefits they give to each other.

We should stop trying to make the platforms good. We should make them gone. We should restore the "good fire" that ended with the growth of financialized Big Tech empires. We should aim for soft landings for users, and stop pretending that there's any safe way to life in the fire zone.

We should let the platforms burn.

WIth respect to the (de-)centralization discussion in DINRG and the Internet community, this raises some important question as to

• what is the role of open interfaces, standards etc today in reality? Are we still using them to build interoperable, possibly federated systems?
• how should technology development, standards setting and regulation evolve to effectively enable user choice (migration, platform selection)?

Discussion

There was a question whether the real issue was that platforms are making a remarkable griphold, buying each other, but they are buying the users, i.e., whether the primary concern is the size of these platforms with this method or the method itself only? Cory replied in saying that size certainly promotes distortions. Scale was problem for two reasons. The contract enforcement function dominates. When the referee is less powerful than the team, it allows teams to cheat.
Secondly, even if we stipulated that companies are well run by smart people, they all make errors, and at that scale the mistakes are much more consequential.

Another question was who is willing to implement the interoperability standards and how companies can be convinved to do that. Cory talked about companies' motivation, i.e., companies wanted walled gardens, or to have APIs with advantages (vs disadvantages) to them. What they really seeked (over competitive interoperability) was to have legal remedies for those who reverse engineer to competitively enter the market. When there was a mandate and permission for inter-operators, if restoring that power was possible, that would help to avoid unquantifiable risk.

Some of these strategies are discussed in Cory upcoming book "How to seize the means of computation”.

Volker Stocker and William Lehr: Ecosystem Evolution and Digital Infrastructure Policy Challenges: Insights & Reflections from an Economics Perspective"

Volker Stocker of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and William Lehr of the Advanced Networking Architecture Group in CSAIL at MIT presented their research on ecosysem evolution and policy challenges from an economics perspective. Volker is an economist with broad experience in interdisciplinay research, and William is a telecommunications and Internet economist and consultant.

Volker talked about the convergence of digital and non-digital worlds and mentioned a few trends that needed attention:

• The shift to the edge and shift to the localization of traffic.
• Ownership and management has shifted in the Internet ecosystem: sometimes hyper giant content providers with proprietary networks, sometimes edge clouds or roving resources.
• Potential consequences: value chain constellations are more complex, diverse & dynamic, resulting in changing ownership and governance structures, industry structures as well as competititve and innovational dynamics.

Volker made three points in his reflections on ecosystem evolution:

1. Essential digital infrastructure is about more than connectiivty, not just connectivities like IPX and ISPs.
2. The majority of the requisite investmenet will be private! E.g., access ISPs, CAPs, CDNs, upstream ISPs, and end-users are all investing.
3. More and new forms of resource sharing will be needed. More network sharing agreements: active & passive sharing arrangements and optimal models are evolving.

William highlighted that the legacy Internet is not the Internet of today, and the economics of yesterday are not those of today. One of the questions is how to restore meaningful competition?

He mentioned the following challenges and paths forward:

1. Multidisciplinary Engagement & Feedback
2. Assymetric Info & Measurements: Metrics and data (and their provenance)
3. Capacity to Detect and Act

Discussion

There was a discussion about how the private sector is expected to profit from the infrastructure development needed by society (assuming investments from the private sector). William replied in saying that
government built/subsidized most infrastructure in most places, with small investments needed initially. Some say significant investment should come from the utilities, which we should not dismiss. But we likely will need a strong argument on how to get there. Either we say there is a lot of money coming from public sector (for example, through taxes) or we have to find a way to manage private actors. Thus policy issues are important. Some of these questions are discussed in Williams paper on "Getting to the Broadband Future Efficiently with BEAD funding”.

Another question alluded to policy lagging behing the technical development, i.e., the mismatch of speed of innovation and speed of regulation (which is really hard at the national and internationl levels). William said that the best hope is standards and architectures that provides options and mentioned the importance of open source software.

Christian Tschudin: Minimal Global Broadcast

Christian Tschudin of the University of Basel presented a research idea called "Minimal Global Broadcast" (abstract). Christian is a computer science professor with a track record of research in Information-Centric Networking, distributed computing, and decentralized systems.

Christian started out from the observation that contacting peers in a decentralized environment is challenging. The key question is how do you learn about a peer’s current coordinates and their preferences? The platforms themselves often offer directories, but these are logically centralized rendezvous servers with a partial view and require trust in these platforms. Instead of conceptualizing an uber directory service Christian proposed a global information dissemination system that focuses on the data, asserting an allowance of “200 bytes of novelty per month
and citizen”.

This global broadcast channel can (and should) be implemented in many ways, starting from sneakernets to shortwave communication and including Internet-based online-services. Christian explained how such a service could be used to facilitate user migration and user discovery on their current preferred platform(s).

Discussion

There were some question on trust in user identities. Christian said that trust roots would be external to MGB, and that there would be different levels of trust, e.g., for inter-personal relationship vs. business relationships.

References

• DINRG charter
• DINRG@IETF-117 Meeting Material
• DINRG@IETF-117 Meeting Minutes
• DINRG@IETF-117 Video Recording
• Volker Stocker and William Lehr; Ecosystem Evolution and Digital Infrastructure Policy Challenges: Insights & Reflections from an Economics Perspective; presentation at IRTF DINRG; 2023-07-25; San Francisco
• ACM SIGCOMM CCR: Report of 2021 DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the Internet
• Cory Doctorow; The 'Enshittification' of TikTok – Or how, exactly, platforms die; Wired; 2023-01-23
• Cory Doctorow; Let the Platforms Burn; 2023-07-10
• Lehr, W. (2023), “Getting to the Broadband Future Efficiently with BEAD funding,” white paper prepared with support from WISPA, January 2023, available at https://www.wispa.org/docs/Lehr_White_Paper_Final.pdf
• Lehr, W. (2022), “5G and AI Convergence, and the Challenge of Regulating Smart Contracts,” in Europe’s Future Connected: Policies and Challenges for 5G and 6G Networks, edited by E. Bohlin and F. Cappelletti, European Liberal Forum (ELF), pages 72-80, available at https://liberalforum.eu/publication/europes-future-connected-policies-and-challenges-for-5g-and-6g-networks/.
• Lehr, W. and V. Stocker (2023), "Next-generation Networks: Necessity of Edge Sharing," forthcoming Frontiers in Computer Science: Networks and Communications, Summer 2023
• Oughton, E., W. Lehr, K. Katsaros, I. Selinis, D. Bubley, and J. Kusuma (2021), "Revisiting Wireless Internet Connectivity: 5G vs. Wi-Fi 6," Telecommunications Policy, 45 (2021) 102127, available at https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0308-5961(21)00032-X.
• Stocker, V. and W. Lehr (2022), “Regulatory Policy for Broadband: A Response to the ‘ETNO Report’s’ Proposal for Intervention in Europe’s Internet Ecosystem,” white paper, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4263096.
• Stocker, V., Smaragdakis, G., and Lehr, W. (2020). The state of network neutrality regulation. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 50, 1 (January 2020), 45–59. https://doi.org/10.1145/3390251.3390258
  Work in progress
• Frias, Z., Mendo, L., Lehr, W. and Stocker, V. (2023), "Measuring NextGen Mobile Broadband: Challenges and Research Agenda for Policymaking", 32nd European International Telecommunications Society Conference (EuroITS2023), June 19-20, Madrid, Spain.
• Lehr, W., D. Sicker, D. Raychaudhuri, V. Singh (2023), “Edge Computing: digital infrastructure beyond broadband connectivity,” TPRC51: Annual Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy, September 22-23, 2023, American University, Washington DC
• Stocker, V. Bauer, J., and Pourdamghani, A. (2023). "Innovation Dynamics in the Internet Ecosystem & Digital Economy Policy”,, 32nd European International Telecommunications Society Conference (EuroITS2023), June 19-20, Madrid, Spain.
• Christian Tschudin; Minimal Global Broadcast (MGB); presentation and abstract at IRTF DINRG meeting at IETF-117, 2023-07-25

Recent years have witnessed the consolidations of the Internet applications, services, as well as the infrastructure. The Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DINRG) aims to provide for the research and engineering community, both an open forum to discuss the Internet centralization phenomena and associated potential threats, and a platform to facilitate the coordination of efforts in identifying the causes of observed consolidations and the mitigation solutions.

Our upcoming DINRG meeting at IETF-117 will feature three talks – by Cory Doctorow, Volker Stocker & William Lehr, and Christian Tschudin.

Documents

• Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn
• Christian Tschudin: Minimal Global Broadcast (MGB)

Logistics

DINRG Meeting at IETF-117 – 2023-07-25, 20:00 to 21:30 UTC

IETF-117 Agenda