Laws, standards and diversity on the Internet

The Internet has no legislative function and no Government. The nearest thing the net has to a lawmaking body is a loose alliance of geeks and technocrats called The Internet Engineering Taskforce (of course, there's a tapestry of other institutions and committees plus the National Governments and wannabes like the ITU – don't get me started...). The IETF devises and distributes Internet standards but its 'laws' are hardly laws at all – even once they're enacted and in use everywhere they're still, impishly, called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The net is a place where real-world imponderables like law and order are remarkably fluid and provisional.

So it's paradoxical that the geeks who run the place day-to-day are so fixated on standards. Standards are the tech world's laws – agreed codes and protocols, some hard, internationally recognised (even with ISO numbers), others informal, even ephemeral. Geeks fetishise compliance with standards. Standards, for these guys, are unarguable – an unchallenged orthodoxy with a substantial moral component. Standards, however, have a downside. They inevitably suppress diversity and innovation. In fact, a world in perfect compliance with standards is, necessarily, a monoculture. The geeks would, no doubt, argue that standards support diversity and drive innovation by permitting communication and reducing the cost of interconnection to almost zero – but this is lazy thinking. Standards support diversity but only at the relatively insubstantial level of expression (up at the top of the Seven Layer Model).

Diversity, if it is to have meaning, must take root at lower levels but this kind of thinking is anathema to the geeks. The idea of running multiple protocols and then arranging for some kind of translation makes them queasy. It screams inefficiency! Disorder! Overhead!. But I imagine a world in which different Internets (for instance) coexist, each a complex expression of some kind of worldview. An explosion of diversity. A rainforest of forms – different in more ways than we can imagine.

This is going to need a big change in philosophy – and we'll need to invest a lot less in compliance and a lot more in translation: we mustn't rebuild Babel on the ruins of the geeks' Jerusalem. Of course, this could all be an infantile fantasy, although I doubt it. I think the unitary, ultra-compliant net of the geeks is a much more pernicious and reductive fantasy than mine...

Comments

[Tim]

Steve

Two thoughts on your interesting post:
a) Firstly, it is surely not 'paradoxical' that a place or system without laws and official governance has standards: it is entirely to be expected that the need for some form of regulation (in the widest sense) demands standards

b) More importantly, your point about translation is very challenging. If I do get what you are saying correctly, however, I am not entirely sure that 'translation' is the right word. To explain: compliance is like adhering to good grammar. The geek wants to parse the parts of speech correctly. However, diversity comes with a little flexibility - disobedience, perhaps pace another post here - and so a language like English has standards that are enormously flexible: we can understand Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Eminem, despite widely different grammar (a compliance issue) and vocabulary.

I think translation is not quite the issue because when I translate I turn one text into another. When I hear new English, say Eminem, I am adding something new to my understanding. The former requires two separate compliant standards (English and French grammars, say), whilst the latter acknowledges one essential grammar that is adaptive with seemingly endless scope for invention and diversity.

In so verbose a fashion I am suggesting that you are looking at something normative and heuristic rather than legalistically proscriptive: standards that develop according to need and don't require 'fixing' as 'standard 0.1', '0.1.2', etc. On the spectrum that runs from norms, through guidelines and standards, to rules and laws, this would move us back towards norms, and away from the geek-heaven that is often law. The only term that seems to fit for me is 'adaptive' - and adaptivity is the mother of diversity.

[Steve Bowbrick]

Thanks for an excellent comment. Of course, in my entry, I'm being a bit hyperbolic. My audience (apart from the whole world) is particularly the almost entirely non-techie participants in the ethics seminar itself so it's awkward choosing a line! Anyway, the motivation for the post was simple: I'm generally uncomfortable with orthodoxy of any kind and the big orthodoxy amongst the geeks is obviously standards (closely followed by openness). I'd like to see both terms challenged fairly robustly - although, as a living, breathing citizen of the net, I'm a major advocate of both - depends on my audience, I suppose.

I like your alternative to translation. I guess my thinking is that the geek solution to the multiple, incompatible protocols problem would be lots of clever protocol translation at network boundaries. My suspicion is that, if we invested more in such clever translation (adaptation, cohabitation, whatever) we'd be better off and better adapted to diversity and non-comformity.

And, of course, this standards orthodoxy is pretty influential, not just amongst the geeks. Look at the single currency. In my mind just another reductive attempt to collapse diverse, non-compliant forms into a big, unadaptive, inflexible unity (although that doesn't make it any less handy in the supermarket). I seem to be the only person on the planet who thinks we actually need *more* currencies, not less (don't tell me, there's actually a club for people like me, right?)

[Tim]

Steve,

Thanks for the reply. I know where you're coming from on single
currencies and this ossifying tendency to standardise.

In the ethical context, I'm reminded of an evening in the Mezzanine
some colleagues and I spent with the former Bishop of Edinburgh,
Richard Holloway a few years back. Holloway spoke of how he felt that
we were getting beyond Thomas Kuhne's paradigms and now needed
'ethical jazz' to deal with the variety of ideas and issues that are
thrown up by modern life.

Perhaps it is indeed 'jazz' that provides a better metaphor: the
ability to switch rhythms, go with a riff and somehow orchestrate on
the hoof. Funnily enough some geeks do get this. There is something in
the hacker ethic (as described by Pekka Himanen) that can respond to
the unorthodox; I suspect it needs presenting in the right way.

Of course, 'how' is another matter. Here's where people who are geeks
manqué slot in (and I suspect we both might fit into this category):
mediators between the geeks and the rest of society; you might even
say translators... ;-)

[Buy Online Rx]

My suspicion is that, if we invested more in such clever translation (adaptation, cohabitation, whatever) we'd be better off and better adapted to diversity and non-comformity.