 The role of internet society and IETF needs to be considered in more depth because after all this organization determines how and in what form do we use the internet today. In this module we look at the role of IETF with regards to the importance it plays in defining the architecture. Then we'd also look at how the standardization process is executed. IETF essentially is a group of scientists, technologists and professors from various parts of the world which come together and develop standards for various technologies. While developing this standard document there's always a consideration that should ensure that whatever protocol is to be proposed at the IETF conference every year it must be performing up to the mark that means it should be a running code. The deployment and usage should be well defined and the deployment and usage should cater for scalability because we know that the number of users are growing every year. Security both of the protocol itself and the asset on which the protocol runs is another important concern that should be ensured and lastly the overall viability operational manageability of the protocol should be bounded otherwise no matter how perfect the protocol may be it is not going to function because it is unmanageable by the administrators and the users. The whole concept of standardization at the IETF starts by a concept which is given to it either by an individual or a group of individuals which may form a BOF. BOF implies the birds of a feather they come up with an idea and they define the goals and milestones what needs to be done with regards to extending a protocol or all together proposing a new protocol they take the area director into confidence this area director is an officiating person at the IETF who takes input from these contributing scientists engineers and technologists and then based on their recommendations either put setup as a formal agenda item at the internet engineering steering group or not. Meanwhile if there is some new work going on at the IETF itself that work is also put in a formal manner at the IESG. After the IESG approves of the viability and purposefulness of some activity then a formal working group is created. Meanwhile the internet architecture board is also taken into confidence. The submission process which started off with the creation of the working group now starts with the first internet draft. The first internet draft is a document which is the first scribing or the initial thoughts which come into the minds of these technologists. These are documented and submitted to the IETF community review through the formal process of going through the IESG. The IETF community may advertise or make a formal call to get such submissions or may be getting it and processing it subsequently. The IETF community thrashes it at the conferences which are held every year and these conferences rotate all over the world. After iterations and addressing the concerns of the IETF IESG the request for comment document processing starts. It is a very serious matter when a document is taken up from being only an internet draft and if it is being considered for RFC. It means there is a lot of discussion a lot of debate. Finally the request for comment is given a status it is assigned a formal number and it is published by the IETF community. Now how does this RFC and the process of converting such RFC into an official standard goes? As it is shown to you here that RFC starts off with an internet draft. After deliberations and thrashing by the scientific community this draft gets converted into a proposed standard. This proposed standard has to be implemented by at least more than one parties from various parts of the world which would actually determine its operational readiness and all the concerns that we had raised before. Then it is created it is upgraded as a draft standard. Now this draft standard is encouraged to be implemented widely by different vendors and universities. After this draft goes through wide implementation and overall a success report and review comes from all the places then it is considered to be the official standard. For most part since the internet evolution is taking place at such a high rate most of the internet drafts which are submitted are only upgraded to the RFC level and that's it. So most of the protocols that we see as in TCP, UDP or IP are mostly the RFCs. Some of them of course have also been upgraded to become formal internet standard.