What’s interesting about this meeting is not that it’s happening. What’s interesting is that there’s a lot of resistance to this idea. It’s rumored, for example, that Ericsson, who has a vested interest in heavily-patented audio methods in use for VoIP, has sent anywhere from 40-100 people to vote against such a working group. (Is this true? I don’t know. But if it is it’s an interesting signal about the types of business interests such a thing might displace.)

Note that this is completely separate from the HTML5 working group and has no relation to those actions. And the IETF is a very different organization from either the whatwg or the W3C. But it’s interesting to see similar discussions taking place in another, similar, organization.