Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Politics of the RFC
Requests for Comments are the condition of possibility for Internet Politics and today is their 40th Birthday. So do read Stephen Crockers Editorial in the NYTimes.
When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at four research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.†R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online.
Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.†Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.
As political scientists we need to ask, what are the strengths and weaknesses of governance mechanisms build on RFCs and code-is-law , do they only work for engineering and standardization problems (not for dilemmas) or can the constitute cultures that can deal with a wider set of collective action problems? If they do, then we need to ask questions about the identity requirements of members of such RFC-communities, etc. A lot of very interesting questions that we are only slowly getting into. David Post outlines an approach to ask these types of questions in part 2 (order) of Jefferson’s Moose, but there are many questions left.
