5 The IETF, and the life of an RFC

5.1 No members, no representatives

3GPP's rules count organisations. The IETF's rules refuse to.

People take part as individual technical contributors, not as formal representatives of the company paying for their flight RFC 2418. Whether that holds in practice is not something any file here can answer; it is what the rules say.

5.2 Areas, working groups, and the IESG

The work is done in working groups, and the working groups are collected into areas. Each area is run by one or two Area Directors RFC 2418.

The IESG is the body that approves IETF standards, which makes it the closest thing the IETF has to 3GPP's plenary. How a working group is formed, chartered, run and shut down is a document of its own RFC 2418, and the full cast of bodies — the IETF and its working groups, the Secretariat, the Internet Society, the IESG, the Internet Architecture Board, IANA and the IRTF — is named in another RFC 2028.

5.3 The draft that is deliberately not a publication

Work in progress is posted to the Internet-Drafts directory for informal review and comment RFC 2026. The status of that posting is spelled out so nobody mistakes it for anything.

A draft that sits unchanged for more than six months without being recommended for publication is simply removed RFC 2026. Nothing is archived under protest; the directory is a workbench, not a library.

5.4 From draft to RFC

The steps are few and each has a waiting period attached.

S1. The working group recommends the draft to its Area Director. The draft must have been public for at least two weeks first RFC 2026.

S2. The IESG runs an IETF-wide Last Call by email. Anyone may comment. The period is at least two weeks, or four if no working group stood behind the document RFC 2026.

S3. If it is approved, the RFC Editor is told to publish it, and the draft is taken out of the Internet-Drafts directory RFC 2026.

The RFC series is the official publication channel and has been running since 1969, as part of the ARPANET project RFC 2026. What the series is, and who runs it, are two further documents RFC 8729, RFC 9280 — named here but not quoted, because the archive on this machine holds them only as XML.

Retiring a standard is the same kind of act, not an administrative one: the IESG moves it to Historic with the same Last Call as any other standards action RFC 2026.

5.5 Two rungs, not three

The entry level of the standards track is Proposed Standard, and the IESG has to act deliberately to put a document there ^[7].

There used to be a third rung in the middle.

The top rung is a demanding one, and its definition is a good answer to the question "when is something really a standard".

Note what does the promoting there: implementations that work with each other, in real use. 3GPP's equivalent test is a plenary vote on a document set.

5.6 Not every RFC is a standard

The series carries several categories at once — Experimental, Informational, Historic and Best Current Practice all live in it alongside the standards track RFC 2026.

Which of the four streams a document came from is stated in its own boilerplate, so a reader can tell an IETF standard from an independent submission without leaving the page RFC 7841.

A few more rules of the road, each in its own document: how to write an RFC RFC 7322, what a contributor must disclose about patents RFC 8179, and how a document hands a registry of numbers to IANA RFC 8126.

5.7 Where the two bodies actually touch

They are not separate worlds. 3GPP's working-methods document requires the OpenAPI files extracted from its specifications to be stored in UTF-8, "as specified in IETF RFC 3629" §5B, RFC 3629.

That is one clause of one document, and it is the clearest example in this material of one body building directly on the other's output.

5.8 What the archive here cannot show

On this machine the archive holds 9,735 RFCs ^[8]. Of those, 8,457 are plain text and numbered 1 to 8649 ^[9], and 1,278 are XML and numbered 8650 to 9953 ^[10]. Some of the missing numbers in the plain-text range were never issued and some exist only as XML; the data does not say which is which.

And it holds RFCs and nothing else — no working group charters, no minutes, no mailing-list archives, no Internet-Drafts. Anything about a particular IETF working group is out of reach from here, and the place to go instead is the website ^[6].