[The following is a long-winded and rambling collection of a few things that
have been on my mind recently. Those of you who prefer short, incisive
observations concerning the semantics of protocol vs. standard would do well
to ignore it. 8^)]
----- Original Message -----
From: Fan, Laurel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 5:01 PM
Subject: RE: [issues] Standards?? PHOOEY!!!
> This doesn't make sense at all. Why should other people go out of their
way
> to support an unproven, and, in fact, nonexistant technology? I don't
> see how eliminating "standards" would help this either. The only reason
you
> can't do this is because the existing players have money, market share,
and
> IP,
> and you don't. This has nothing to do with standards, and is an entirely
> different issue.
>
> (And IIRC, this has in fact been done, one example is the Playstation 2)
I've always been a vocal supporter of standards -- especially on the WWW --
and have taken part in more than a few flame wars when the old saw about
committees of ivory-tower dwellers spending years thwarting innovation in
order to protect their fiefdom was trotted out.
I still feel the same way, but see a significant threat on the horizon.
First, though, a few thoughts on why standards (formal and informal) work:
One of the great beauties of the Internet lies in the *sensible* application
of standards. The basic premise of end-to-end networks is that the
connection needs to be standards-based, and therefore predictable. The
actual instructions being communicated, and the way they are reacted to, has
been left more or less wide open. This is a nearly ideal recipe for
innovation. We develop a fairly robust and simple means for extremely
diverse systems to interoperate, then we allow virtually anything to
transpire during that interaction. Without this kind of approach, the
Internet as we know it could never have been.
Tim Berners-Lee's genius made the WWW possible through the implementation of
a couple of well-chosen and very simple rules:
* Everything has a unique address.
* Error handling is brutally simple: If the client can't (or won't)
support something, it can act as if that thing doesn't exist.
* The server should never ever pretend it knows anything more than a few
basic things about the client. The client should decide how to deal with the
data it receives.
The extent to which the WWW has succeeded can largely be compared the level
of acceptance among the Internet population of these fundamental rules.
Now the dark cloud to this silver lining:
I recently attended the annual conference of the World Wide Web Consortium,
a hotbed of ivory-tower innovation-killers if ever there was one. It's an
industry consortium, i.e. made up mostly of commercial organizations who
have a vested interest in seeing standards developed and implemented on the
WWW. One of the areas of focus in this year's conference was the wireless
web. And one of the most controversial topics was WAP (Wireless Application
Protocol). This standard has been hammered out by those corporations with a
vested interest in profiting from the intersection of wireless and Internet
technologies.
Most of these companies were taken by surprise by the WWW, and a have real
fear that the genie is out of the bottle as far as the personal computer
revolution is concerned. They want to stuff it back in. Those corporations
whose profits lie in controlling communication and content (telcos,
content-driven companies like Time/Warner etc.) have been threatened by:
* The fact that Internet has no center. If anyone can communicate with
anyone, how can they maintain any control over what people see and do?
* The fact that digital content is infinitely reproducible. As long as
the creation and distribution of television, radio and other entertainment
or information content remained prohibitively expensive, they could make a
mint out of it. Now that anyone can create a quality website, copy a
Metallica MP3, or even stream television signals lie over the Web, their
ability to make a profit has been severely compromised.
* The fact that open source philosophy has made it possible for
large-scale undertakings to happen outside the hallowed halls of the moneyed
few. The truth is that Microsoft's greatest threat is not the government of
the United States, but the quirky and dynamic creation of the spare creative
cycles of an army of subversives. As soon as people realize that they can
make their own Titanic, their own X Files, -- their own stock markets, for
that matter -- there's going to be hell to pay.
Many of us have laughed up our sleeves at Goliath's failure to understand
Internet technology and it ramifications. We've choked on our morning coffee
when we read about the latest copyright lawsuit or the DMCA. We've railed
against their stupidity in thousands of forums.
We should stop laughing.
WAP represents a significant change in their tactics. It goes beyond the MS
Borgification (sorry, 'embrace and extend') approach to standards, and
learns the crucial lesson from ESR's 'Homesteading the Noosphere': This
really *is* a land rush. Squatter's rights count for everything. They took a
look at the shape of the Internet, perceived their weaknesses on that front,
and removed the liabilities from WAP:
* WAP requires that content be translated from text-based to binary
format before being transmitted to the client device. Guess who controls
that gateway?
* By forcing an intermediary into the transaction (the translation
layer), they keep a choke-hold on content. Their offerings will likely
resemble AOL more than the Internet: a wide range of choices, all of which
have been predetermined by the provider. In other words, the semblance, but
not the essence, of free choice.
* They control the client(s). By teaming up with the makers of wireless
devices and the service providers, they can ensure that, for example, if you
want to get CNN weather updates on your cellular phone, it's going to have
to be a Nokia with the AT&T service package[*]. The expense of
custom-formatting content for particular devices relegates high-volume,
dynamic content creation to those who can afford the infrastructure to
support the effort.
* They own the network from end to end. If you want your content to ride
this segment of the network, you will have to pay the toll -- economically
and intellectually.
These people are bright. At least, they hire bright people. WAP was
presented to this conference as a done deal, as an enabling technology that
would generate business opportunities by the bucket-full. In all likelihood,
it will do so. But it will not brook unwelcome intrusions of the type that
made the Internet so brash and dynamic. These corporations have, in effect
erected a prefab subdivision at the edge of the existing frontier. When the
dusty travellers arrive in this particular edge of the commons, they will
find it paved, with all mod cons available -- for a price.
Much of what I've written above had been cribbed from a talk delivered by
Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School. I suggest that those of you who want
to understand this trend better read his recent writings.
[* These are exemplary and arbitrary choices. They probably don't have any
resemblance to the actual permutations. I'm not an American, and don't
really know who does what down there, so I picked the names out of a hat. I
might as easily have chosen ESPN, Ericsson and Cantel.]
--
Dan McGarry
http://www.moodindigo.com/
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