2. Facebook's interests in the standard are not necessarily what drives the standard; Facebook can just be along for the ride.

I think what's going to happen with this is what happens to all de novo IETF designs other than TLS, the one that the market requires actually work: it's going to fail. That's also the outcome that I'm hoping for.

In the meantime, if Millican wants to get together with Katriel Cohn-Gordon and do a Facebook-only ART protocol design for Facebook Messenger, with an eye towards replacing Signal Protocol in WhatsApp, that would be a great development. So would a Cisco-only ART messenger, or maybe even a Mozilla ART messenger (though Mozilla's motives are the ones I trust least here).

What does not make sense is for a protocol whose service model we barely understand even in theory to be designed from scratch in an open standards group. The IETF motto used to be "loose consensus and working code". Now it's "take an RWC paper, add the P-curves to it, and use it to fuck over the most successful secure messaging protocol".

We shouldn't be cheerleading this. It's capture, not progress.