As long suspected by some, the IETF is going to be closing up the Mail Transfer Agent Authentication in DNS (MARID) Working Group according to today’s post by Ted Hardie, co-AD for Applications. Larry Seltzer of eWeek was right on target about this:

The rest of the SID standards process will now be a waste of time thanks to Microsoft, and the other participants will afterwards pick up the pieces and get the job done with another spec.

Apparently the IETF felt even stronger than that and decided to close up the group altogether. Beside the IPR issues that Larry Seltzer mentions, the technical issues that have been bubbling since the arguments in the ASRG have resurfaced. The IPR issues also made things worse in a way by distracting participants from focusing on technical issues which is one of the things Ted mentions:

These assessments have been difficult in part because they have been moved out of the realm of pure engineering by the need to evaluate IPR and licensing related to at least one proposal in the light of a variety of licenses associated with the deployed base of MTAs.

There are already calls for moving this into a “better” standards organization such as OASIS, especially by Phil Hallam-Baker of Verisign who is not a big fan of the IETF:

Before MARID my preference was to work on the specs in OASIS which is a much more professional outfit than the IETF and actually has a track record of succeeding with short timescale proposals. We don’t need a big imprimatur here, just some group that has an ISO accreditation of some form.

Of course none of the other standards organizations have the same “open to anyone” membership policy as the IETF does and if anything comes out of the other organizations, it is likely to be something done by big firms only, not to mention possible IPR. The FOSS world will probably fight that standard and continue going with SPF, and so we might end up fighting these for a while. The big thing that Phil is missing is that the IETF is not the problem here - the market is. As Paul Vixie, and many others have pointed out before, several competing proposals will be out for a while and it is better to let the market sort it out. It was too premature to send this over for standardization. I have to hand it to the IETF to be able to make the hard decision to close the group instead of letting it linger on life support - that decision is not easy to make, and it probably took some guts going against some traditions. This proves that the IETF is becoming more agile and responsive.

In a way I feel bad since this was one standard that came out of the ASRG during the time that I co-chaired it that would have went somewhere. But as the old Yiddish saying goes: “Man plans, G-d laughs”.

P.S. As a feeling of deja vu, while I co-chaired the ASRG we tried unsuccessfully to merge DMP, RMX and SPF in the RMX and SMTP-VERIFY subgroups. Both efforts have failed for similar reasons that MARID did minus the IPR (although it played some role).