Get rid of the gateways, and the need for the directory will largely disappear. The IETF has played a major role in the past and will continue to do so. The IETF provided a vendor-neutral ground and technically sound development and review processes that made the unprecedented industrywide adoption of LDAP possible. The IETF will continue to play an important role as LDAP evolves, even as the market begins to drive development of the standard. Right now, for example, the IETF is working on defining the next version of LDAP, which will better address security and internationalization issues, among other things.
Vendors also play an important role in the directory service realm, just as in other areas.
We've seen this with HTML and other standards, and directory service will be no exception. Vendors are now on a faster track than the IETF itself, which means they will often lead the standards efforts, bringing new features to the user community before they are fully introduced to the standards process. We at NSI are refining the RWhois protocol-a protocol that by nature reduces a query in the effort to determine whether it can locate a server to respond to the requested information. We believe that in the near future, the result of our efforts will allow for distributed, secure, and authoritative registration of network objects by network operators as well as independent applications. Using the referral mechanism and authority area, it is our intent to have RWhois glue several directory services protocols together.