> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts,

Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes. You called a computer as if it were a telephone (or maybe that was Datakit?) and ATM handed the user a byte stream like TCP. Imagine never needing an IP stack or setting traffic priority because the network already handles the QoS. Was it simple to deploy? No. Was it cheap? Nooohooohooohooo. Was Ethernet any of those? YES AND YES. ATM was superior but lost to the simpler and cheaper Ethernet which was pretty crappy in its early days (thinnet, thicknet, terminators, vampire taps, AUI, etc.) but good enough.

The funny part is this has the unintended consequences of needing to reinvent the wheel once you get to the point where you need telecom sized/like infrastructure. Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs so various hacks and standards have been developed to paper over these deficiencies which is what TSN is - reinventing ATM's determinism. In addition we also now have OTN, yet another protocol to further paper over the various other protocols to mux everything down a big fat pipe to the other end which allows Ethernet (and IP/ATM/etc) to ride deterministically between data-centers.

> Did any of the ITU standards win?

Maybe X.500 - also known as LDAP, and widely deployed across enterprises in the form of Active Directory.

The rivalry continues in the fibre era, with ITU's GPON and successors competing with IEEE EPON etc. ITU does seem to have lost out comprehensively at layer 3. They do some stuff like OAM which is only interesting at Telco scale, although in the mobile era bodies like ETSI are more relevant.

The other difference from that era, and even the early internet era, is how much is no longer standardised at all, but decided by global monopolies. Back then it was a given that Everything would at least need to interoperate at the national level. But we may be returning to that .

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer?

Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way networking stacks are described in educational materials, despite the fact that it bears no relation to how any of the networking stack was developed or is used. If you really dig into how the OSI model is supposed to work, one of the layers described only matters for teletypes--which were are a dying, if not dead, technology when the model was developed in the first place.

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising.

Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the standards body happy (ie, has enough info to make it worthwhile to purchase the specification), and not revealing the secret sauce in their implementation.

I've done it, and it's an absolute nightmare. The IETF RFCs are a breath of fresh air in comparison. Not only can you read the source, there are example implementations!

And if you think that didn't lead to a better outcome, you're kidding yourself. The ITU process naturally leads to a small number of large engineering orgs publishing just enough information so they can interoperate, while keeping enough hidden so the investment discourages the rise of smaller competitors. The result is, even now I can (and do) run my own email server. If the overly complicated bureaucratic ITU standards had won the day, I'm sure email would have been run by a small number of CompuServe like rent seeking parasites for decades.

I'll note that while X.509 certificates are deployed widely on the Internet, they are not deployed in the manner the ITU intended. There is no global X.500 directory and Distinguished Names are just opaque identifiers that are used to help find issuers during chain building. That hardly counts as a win for the ITU in my book.

LDAP might have won over DAP, but it's still heavily based on the X.500-family of standards. Unlike SMTP (which is a completely different standard), LDAP is strongly based on DAP and other X.500 family standards.

Besides LDAP and X.509, you've got old standards that were very successful for a while. I'm perhaps a little bit too young for this, but I vaguely remember X.25 practically dominated large-scale networking, and for a while inter-network TCP/IP was often run over X.25. X.25 eventually disappeared because it was replaced by newer technology, but it didn't lose to any contemporary standard.

And if you're looking for new technology, CTAP (X.1278) is a part of the WebAuthn standard, which does seem to be winning.

I'm pretty sure there are other X-standards common in the telco industry, but even if we just look at the software industry, some ITU-T standards won out. This is not to say they weren't complex or that we didn't have simpler alternatives, but sometimes the complex standards does win out. The "worse is better" story is not always true.

The OP article is definitely wrong about this:

> “Of all the things OSI has produced, one could point to X.400 as being the most successful,

There are many OSI standards that are more successful than X.400, by the seer virtue of X.400 being an objective failure. But even putting that aside, there are X-family standards that are truly successful and ubiquitous.X.500 and X.509 are strong contenders, but the real winner is ASN.1 (the X.680/690 family, originally X.208/X.209).

ASN.1 is everywhere: It's obviously present in other ITU-T based standards like LDAP, X.509, CTAP and X.400, but it's been widely adopted outside of ITU-T in the cryptography world. PKCS standards (used for RSA, DSA, ECDSA, DH and ECDH key storage and signatures), Kerberos, S/MIME, TLS. It's also common in some common non-cryptographic protocols like SNMP and EMV (chip and pin and contactless payment for credit cards). Even if your using JOSE or COSE or SSH (which are not based on ASN.1), ASN.1-based PKCS standards are often still used for storing the keys. And this is completely ignoring all the telco standards. ASN.1 is everywhere.

H.261-264 video codecs, depending on your definition of "win".

X.25 and other ITU specs won out massively in aviation, and they are just recently starting to go through the slow painful process of moving to IP. We'll probably see it hanging around for at least another 15 years in that sector.

Worse is Better: https://web.archive.org/web/20040619155500/http://www.jwz.or...

> In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP.

Using ITU voice codecs!

And you could add any number of the big standards group-based standards that a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears were poured into. Not universally the case, but more true than false.

As x509 goes. I doubt many could explain it off hand with BER, DER and others being subset to ASN.1 and other obscura.

I’ve never been a fan

At the time, when there were so many different platforms still in existence, "easier to implement" was in fact a major component of "better".

A lot of the IETF standards winning was vendors avoiding work even when paid for.

Another was NIH in considerable important places.

Yet another was that ITU standards promoted use of compilers generating serialization code from schema, and that required having that compiler. One common issue I found out from trying to rescue some old Unix OSI code was that the most popular option in use at many universities was apparently total crap.

In comparison, you could plop a grad student with telnet to experiment with SMTP. Nobody cared that it was shitty, because it was not supposed to be used long. And then nobody wanted to invest in better.

It's not so much that SMTP won, it's that X.400 lost because it suuuuucked. Anyone who's ever had to work with that piece of s*t, as opposed to rhapsodising over what it could theoretically do, can tell you stories about this. It made Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes look good in comparison. Notes actually did X.400, so imagine Notes but even suckier.

The critical part of that quote "Like a car with no brakes or seatbelts."

Yes, the TCP/IP protocol stack beat the OSI protocol stack comprehensively, even down to four layers beating out seven unless you're so wedded to the Magic Number of Seven that you see Session as distinct from Application in the modern world, like how Newton was so wedded to seeing Seven Shades of Light in a spectrum he was sure to note indigo as distinct from violet in the rainbow.

(Presentation and Session are currently taught in terms of CSS and cookies in HTML and HTTP, respectively. When the web stack became Officially Part of the Officiously Official Network Stack is quite beyond me, and rather implies that you must confound the Web and the Internet in order to get the Correct Layering.)

https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html - The Actual OSI Model

> I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that network stack is not the one we use today. In fact, the TCP/IP stack we use today was intentionally designed differently from the OSI model for practical reasons.

> The OSI model is not some "ideal" model of networking, it is not a "gold standard" or even a "useful reference." It's the architecture of a specific network stack that failed to gain significant real-world adoption.