Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open standards organization that develops voluntary technical standards for the Internet. Founded in 1986, it has no formal membership: anyone can take part, and its output is published as Requests for Comments (RFCs).

History of the IETF

The first IETF meeting took place in January 1986 at Linkabit in San Diego, with 21 attendees. The fourth meeting, held at SRI in Menlo Park in October 1986, was the first that vendors from outside government attended. Working groups, which now do most of the organization’s work, were introduced at the fifth meeting.

The structure changed again in the early 1990s. After the Internet Society was formed in January 1992, the Internet Architecture Board proposed that its activities take place under the Society’s auspices. During the INET92 conference in Kobe, Japan, the Society’s trustees approved a new charter for the Board. The IETF and the Internet Research Task Force became the two remaining task forces.

Britannica describes the IETF as a loosely structured group of several thousand interested individuals running a grassroots development process for Internet standards. As one example of its output, the IETF published a 128-bit address standard in 1998 after four years of study, as a successor to the 32-bit standard used by the earlier Internet Protocol.

In October 2004 the community adopted a written mission statement, RFC 3935, which still anchors how the IETF describes itself.

Structure and participation

There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone can take part by signing up to a working group mailing list or registering for a meeting. Participants are expected to act as individuals, including those whose employers pay for their time. In any one year more than 7,000 people actively participate by writing documents, joining mailing list discussions or attending meetings. The IETF works only in English and has a code of conduct, an anti-harassment policy and an Ombudsteam to handle complaints.

Participants come from all over the world and from many parts of the Internet industry, and the IETF says they should be treated with dignity and respect whatever their background. RFC 3935 explains that individuals, not companies, governments or interest groups, are the fundamental unit of the organization, because the process works best when it is built around people.

Several groups support the technical work. The Internet Engineering Steering Group manages the standards process, and the Internet Architecture Board gives long-range technical direction. The Internet Research Task Force runs long-term research groups. A Nominating Committee fills leadership posts, the IETF Trust holds intellectual property, and the RFC Editor function edits, publishes and archives RFCs.

How the IETF develops standards

New work usually starts as an Internet-Draft, a discussion document that anyone can write. If a working group adopts it, the group refines it on its mailing list, where all official work takes place. Decisions are made by rough consensus, not voting. A draft that has the approval of the appointed technical leadership and the consensus support of the IETF as a whole goes through professional editing and receives an RFC number.

RFCs describe the technical foundations of the Internet, including addressing, routing and transport. They also specify protocols such as TLS 1.3, QUIC and WebRTC, which support services used by billions of people, including email, real-time collaboration and the Domain Name System. The IETF also has policies on intellectual property so that participants learn of any restrictions on a proposal as early as possible.

RFC 3935 lists five guiding principles. They are open process, technical competence, a volunteer core, rough consensus and running code, and protocol ownership. The last means that when the IETF takes responsibility for a protocol it accepts responsibility for all of its aspects, and that it does not try to control protocols it does not own.

The RFC Editor website is the authoritative home of published RFCs, and the IETF Datatracker records the process behind each one, so anyone can see how a document moved from draft to standard. That transparency follows from the open process principle.

Meetings and funding

The IETF holds three week-long meetings a year. Onsite attendance averages between 1,000 and 1,500, and more than 600 people join remotely. The meetings are working sessions, not conferences: most of the agenda is parallel working group meetings, and there is no exhibition hall.

The only fee the IETF charges is for meeting registration, with options in place so that the cost does not become a barrier. Money and administration are handled by the IETF Administration LLC, which is the corporate legal home for the IETF, the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Research Task Force. It supports operations, manages finances and budget, and raises money on the IETF’s behalf. It is run by an Executive Director and overseen by a board of directors.

The LLC structure is described in RFC 8711, which sets out the roles of the LLC board, the Executive Director and the Internet Society in the fiscal and administrative support of the IETF. That arrangement replaced an earlier oversight committee.

What the IETF does not control

The IETF is explicit about the limits of its authority. It says that it makes voluntary standards that are often adopted by Internet users, network operators and equipment vendors, but that it does not control or patrol the Internet. RFC 3935 defines a standard as a description of how to do something, with no attempt to mandate its use. The benefit, the document explains, is interoperability, meaning that products from different makers can work together.

The mission statement also says the Internet is not value-neutral and neither is the IETF. It describes a preference for decentralized control, empowerment of users at the edge of the network and sharing of resources, choices that reflect the community’s values and not just technical possibility.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue