# IETF

The Internet Engineering Task Force — the open, consensus-driven body that standardizes the internet's core protocols through the RFC series.

**The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)** is the open standards organization that develops and maintains the internet's core protocols — among them TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, and HTTP — publishing them as freely available [RFCs](/docs/rfc-10008-http-query.md). It has no membership fee and no corporate gatekeeper: anyone may participate, and standards advance by "rough consensus and running code" rather than by ownership.

## In the library

- [RFC 10008: The HTTP QUERY Method](/docs/rfc-10008-http-query.md) (2026) — a safe, idempotent way to carry a query in the request body.
- [robots.txt](/docs/robots-txt.md) — informal for nearly thirty years, then formalized by the IETF as RFC 9309.

## Significance

The IETF is the closest thing the open web has to a neutral steward, and its output is deliberately a commons: RFCs are free to read and to republish. That is the counter-model to standards owned and frozen by a single company — the distinction the [governance of agent-readable standards](/wiki/governance-of-agent-readable-standards.md) turns on, and a structural expression of [decentralization](/wiki/decentralization.md): the rules of the network belong to no one and everyone.

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## Backlinks

Pages that link here:

- [Tim Berners-Lee](/wiki/berners-lee.md) — Inventor of the World Wide Web and advocate for a decentralized, machine-readable, user-controlled web.
- [The Governance of Agent-Readable Standards](/wiki/governance-of-agent-readable-standards.md) — The five agent-readable web standards differ sharply in who governs them — and that trajectory is the real story.