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. 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 (2026) — a safe, idempotent way to carry a query in the request body.
- robots.txt — 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 turns on, and a structural expression of decentralization: the rules of the network belong to no one and everyone.