First blog post! Hello world, and welcome to what I think. This time, why I believe there may be benefits to changing the way we deal with standardization in technology.
The internet was conceived with many hopes in the minds of its creators. Some hoped to cut the extensive costs of owning and using a computer in the mid-sixties. Others hoped for a resilient communication network in the time of Cold War. Still others placed in the internet the hope that resources could be shared quickly among far-flung academic havens on both sides of the United States. For any of these aims to be achieved, there was one basic problem to solve; getting computers to talk to each other.
As the first network was developed under the guidance of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960’s, the project ran into various problems; how to physically connect the computers, how to avoid overburdening the networked computers with the mammoth task of simply communicating, and, of course, how to translate among the many computer languages. It was this last problem that gave us the first instance of standardization; all four networked computers in the first ‘internet’ communicated with Interface Message Processors, or IMPs, which in turn communicated with each other, all via standardized “headers” on the information, or ‘packet,’ being sent, which told each IMP the destination and origin of the packet. Soon, the hosts themselves would be called upon to learn to work together and create something of a common language in order to communicate.
In the subsequent years, as the internet as we know it was built, as it grew, fluctuated, and changed, one theme remained relatively present; standardization. Since 1865, the International Telecommunications Union (since 1949 recognized by the United Nations), has been producing communications standards for the globe. It was the ITU which brought together the many disparate computer companies under a common global umbrella after the creation of the World Wide Web, a vast magnification of the original standardized headers and cooperative host computers (Overview of ITU’s History). Not only did the ITU create standards, many of the countries of the world created their own bodies to enforce them within their borders; today, the International Organization for Standardization boasts more than 162 countries as members who cooperate to implement these standards (About ISO).
Well.
So what?
It seems clear that standard web is a boon for many; creating connections, allowing for international communication, and preventing any one company from winning a monopoly over a specific consumer by forcing them to use only their technology. What could be the problem?
The problem in my perspective is that we don’t know any other way. From the beginnings of the internet to today, standards have been present, both out of necessity and out of a desire for interconnectedness. As a result we innovate within a set of parameters, parameters which allow us to communicate- think the use of IP dresses for interconnected devices. These standards are constantly under review, to be sure, but the lumbering body of the ITU cannot change fast enough to keep up with the pace of technology. What if there is a better way to share data than through packets? Or a better way to build the internet than the somewhat haphazard infrastructure which has grown up around a loose set of building codes?
In the end, I certainly don’t think that standardization is not overwhelmingly good for the internet. Indeed, the standards themselves are the foundation on which all internet infrastructure runs. But I suppose I am skeptical of what we might be missing out of respect for standards. I believe it would be a worthwhile experiment for some entity, government, academic, or corporate, or some combination thereof, to experiment outside of our network, to develop new means of connection and communication. At the same time, it would be worthwhile to consider a replica of the United Nations’ security council, a small body which governs the use of UN troops and moves much faster than the full assembly, for the creation of internet standards within the ITU, in order to better respond to changing technology. We’ll never know what the internet could be until we try.
Hannah
Hi Hannah–
This is a nice piece, but I think you will find that the governance of the Internet is a lot different (and a lot stranger) than you lay out here. While the ITU has lots of standards that govern many kinds of communication networks (mostly having to do with telephones), the Internet is not one of the networks that the ITU (at least at the moment) governs. The actual governing body, if there is one, is the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) which is one of the odder governing bodies you will ever encounter.
In general, the problem of how to govern technology is a difficult one–most governance bodies are slow and deliberative, while most technology changes are fast and loose. We will talk a lot more about these sorts of things over the course of the semester.
Going beyond Jim’s helpful comments, you might want to read some of the history of Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks, which was a competing technology to the Internet Protocol (IP) when I started at Harvard back in the early 1990s. It’s an instance of what you wished might happen: Use cases were identified that people felt IP couldn’t handle well. In the end, IP evolved a bit and dominated, even though ATM was superior in some important ways. What wins is a game of more than just technology or standards. We’ll talk about this fascinating space throughout the course.