“This document is an Internet-Draft (I-D). Anyone may submit an I-D to the IETF. This I-D is not endorsed by the IETF and has no formal standing in the IETF standards process.”
The book on which it is based is well worth reading too… the story “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages…”
> > Anyone can write an internet draft. Getting concensus on it is the hard part.
> Not really. RFCs in the Informational category don't need consensus:[1]
In practice, that's not been true for many years. The process was recently clarified: "IETF Stream Documents Require IETF Rough Consensus" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8789.html
The IETF charges attendees $650 in meeting registration, and receives close to $1M/year in sponsorship from the Internet Society and industry (budgets on http://iaoc.ietf.org/). Free access to IETF standards is subsidised out of other fees...