Summary

The Internet and IP have both enjoyed unprecedented levels of acceptance in the past decade. Despite the attention lavished on the Internet, IP has become more widely used. Many organizations require IP to support their application baseapplications that have nothing to do with the Internet. Many other organizations directly contribute to the Internet's evolution and technological advance by letting their technical personnel participate in the IETF in its standards-setting work.

Ben Franklin once said that you should enjoy laws and sausages, but don't even try to understand how either one gets made. His reasoning was that you would lose your appetite for both. I must confess that, to the newcomer, the IETF's standards-setting process also fits this policy. It is a world in which a standard is not necessarily a standard, but an RFC might be. Hopefully, the overview provided in this chapter helps makes things a bit easier to understand.

This book focuses on one particular output of the IETF: the Internet's addressing scheme. Even private networks must conform to the rules and protocols established and enforced through the various mechanisms outlined in this chapter, so an understanding of how those entities operate is essential. The next chapter examines the IP address space (and its underlying mathematics) much more closely.