Lars Eggert becomes the new chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This is the first time that the most important standardization organization for the further development and maintenance of Internet protocols has a German boss. This was announced by the IETF nomination committee (NomCom) on the evening of 15. January 2021.

Eggert is in Main job as Technical Director at the US storage specialist NetApp and works from Finland. Like his predecessors Jari Arkko (Ericsson) and Alissa Cooper (Cisco), Eggert is likely to campaign for reforms in the working methods and structures of the time-honored IETF.

Lars Eggert becomes the new chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force. The network specialist recently advanced the specification of the QUIC transport protocol.

The computer scientist, who has a doctorate from the University of Southern California, has been active in the IETF for around two decades, and has been on the cutting edge of networking. He headed the Transport Area, i.e. the area that takes care of the further development of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). He is currently the chairman of the working group for the TCP successor QUIC.

From 2011 to 2017 He was chairman of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), the research sister of the IETF, and tried to get more young scientists into bring the standardization organization. Among other things, the annual award of an IRTF prize for applied network research helped.

Researcher type instead of veteran He also bridges the gap between application and research in his main job at NetApp: One of his tasks is to raise funds for NetApp. One of his last coups was a program to develop “Federated Private Cloud Structures” (SSICLOPS) as part of the Horizon program 2020.

Active for the German subsidiary of NetApp for many years, he 2018 moved back to Finland, not least because of the better childcare as he once revealed. The competition for the chairmanship of the IETF was fierce. The election of Eggert by the 17 – headed NomCom underpins the generation change. In addition to Eggert, several candidates with a long history in the IETF applied, such as the former IETF chairman and former Cisco engineer Fred Baker.

Europe instead of Asia The standardizers can expect Eggert to push ahead with reforms to newer ways of working, such as collaboration via GitHub instead of the classic IETF way of working via mailing list. This will especially please the younger developers, with whom Eggert currently has a lot to do as head of the working group for the standardization of the QUIC transport protocol. The average age in the QUIC Working Group is 10 or even 15 Years below the general IETF average age, said Eggert recently in an interview with heise online.

The NomCom election result, however, is reflective also the efforts of the IETF to avoid a dispute over the “New IP”. Behind New IP are the Chinese network equipment supplier Huawei and its research subsidiary Futurewei, who want to counter the weaknesses of the current Internet architecture with their own concepts. Huawei had sent several candidates into the race for the IETF chairmanship. In view of the increasing calls for more diversity, including at the IETF, an IETF chairman of an Asian company would actually have been overdue. This would have brought the originally US-influenced organization, however, the hiccups about New IP and sanctions policy. Eggert’s election as IETF chairmanship seems to promise calmer waters. Previously, Harald Alvestrand and Jari Arkko were two Europeans who held this office.

Eggert was quite clearly against New IP and clearly distanced itself from proposals in various working groups to curtail encryption in favor of better management and monitoring. However, there was bad press for his employer when Bloomberg 17 reported that NetApp software came to Syria via an Italian company and was used there by the Syrian regime to monitor government opponents.

Handover in March Until the handover of the current chairman, Cisco engineer Alissa Cooper, in March, Eggert has to give up his other duties in the IETF. He said it would be really difficult to say goodbye to the QUIC Working Group, which is working under high pressure and with many extra meetings. Anyway, version 1 of the new transport protocol will be ready by then.

(dz)