The Network Protocol Battle
George V. Neville-Neil · Queue · 2012
Dear KV, I’ve been working on a personal project that involves creating a new network protocol. Out of curiosity, I tried to find out what would be involved in getting an official protocol number assigned for my project and discovered that it could take a year and could mean a lot of back and forth with the powers that be at the IETF. I knew this wouldn’t be as simple as clicking something on a Web page, but a year seems excessive, and really it’s not a major part of the work, so it seems like this would mainly be a distraction. For now, I just took a random protocol number that I know doesn’t conflict with anything on my network and things seem to work fine. I guess my real question is why would anyone bother to go to the IETF to ask for this unless they were a company that could waste someone’s time on an e-mail campaign to get a properly assigned number?