Guide

What is the IETF?

Written by The metasystema editorial team · published 22 August 2026 · last reviewed 23 August 2026 · how we write these

The Internet Engineering Task Force is the open standards organisation that develops and maintains the internet's core technical protocols. If a specification governs how packets, names, mail or web requests move between independent systems, the IETF probably wrote it and published it as an RFC.

It has no members

The IETF is not a corporation, a consortium or a treaty body. There is no membership, no joining fee and no seat to buy. Participation is by individual: you subscribe to a working group's mailing list and start contributing. People typically arrive through their employers — vendors, operators, browser makers, universities — but they participate as engineers, not as delegates casting a company's vote.

The IETF is administratively housed under the Internet Society, with technical oversight from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and day-to-day management by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), whose Area Directors approve documents for publication.

Rough consensus and running code

The IETF's founding principle, coined by David Clark in 1992, is often quoted in full: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."

In practice that means two things. Rough consensus is not unanimity and not a majority vote — it is the working group chair's judgement that the substantive objections have been addressed and the remaining disagreement is not a blocker. Running code means a specification is expected to be implemented and interoperability tested, ideally before it is finalised; a protocol that only works on paper does not advance.

Working groups

Nearly all work happens in working groups, each with a narrow written charter and a defined set of deliverables. Groups are organised into areas — Applications and Real-Time, Security, Routing, Internet, Operations and Management, Transport, and General — each led by Area Directors. Groups close when their charter is finished, which is why the list of active groups looks quite different every few years.

Everything is public: mailing list archives, drafts, meeting minutes and recordings. The IETF meets in person three times a year, but the mailing list is where consensus is formally judged — attendance at a meeting confers no extra standing.

How a document becomes an RFC

1. Internet-Draft. Anyone can submit one. Drafts expire after six months unless revised, and carry the standard warning that they are works in progress and must not be cited as anything else.
2. Working group adoption. If a group agrees the work fits its charter, the draft becomes a group document and is revised in public.
3. Working Group Last Call, then IETF-wide Last Call — a final review open to the entire community.
4. IESG review and approval. Area Directors raise DISCUSS positions that must be resolved.
5. Publication by the RFC Editor, which assigns the permanent number.

The IETF is not the only stream that produces RFCs — the IAB, the IRTF (research) and independent submissions also publish through the same series — and each RFC's header records which stream it came from.

What the IETF does not do

Web page and browser APIs belong to the W3C and WHATWG. IP address and domain name allocation is administered by IANA and ICANN. Physical and link-layer networking (Ethernet, Wi-Fi) is IEEE 802 territory. The IETF's domain is the protocols in between: the internet layer up through applications.

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