[BITList] How the Internet got its rules

[John Feltham]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

April 7, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
How the Internet Got Its Rules

By STEPHEN D. CROCKER
Bethesda, Md.

TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th  
anniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside the  
technical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.’s, but  
these humble documents shape the Internet’s inner workings and have  
played a significant role in its success.

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. The government financed the network and the hundred or fewer  
computer scientists who used it. It was such a small community that we  
all got to know one another.

A great deal of deliberation and planning had gone into the network’s  
underlying technology, but no one had given a lot of thought to what  
we would actually do with it. So, in August 1968, a handful of  
graduate students and staff members from the four sites began meeting  
intermittently, in person, to try to figure it out. (I was lucky  
enough to be one of the U.C.L.A. students included in these wide- 
ranging discussions.) It wasn’t until the next spring that we realized  
we should start writing down our thoughts. We thought maybe we’d put  
together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the  
rules by which computers exchange information. I offered to organize  
our early notes.

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve- 
racking project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in,  
but I worried we might sound as though we were making official  
decisions or asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath  
of some prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast  
establishment. I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and  
when I finally tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic  
communication between two computers, it was in the wee hours of the  
morning. I had to work in a bathroom so as not to disturb the friends  
I was staying with, who were all asleep.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, 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.

But we started writing these notes before we had e-mail, or even  
before the network was really working, so we wrote our visions for the  
future on paper and sent them around via the postal service. We’d mail  
each research group one printout and they’d have to photocopy more  
themselves.

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details,  
although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important  
than the content of those first documents was that they were available  
free of charge and anyone could write one. 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.

After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing  
to do the same task in the same way. For example, if we wanted to move  
a file from one machine to another, and if you were to design the  
process one way, and I was to design it another, then anyone who  
wanted to talk to both of us would have to employ two distinct ways of  
doing the same thing. So there was plenty of natural pressure to avoid  
such hassles. It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents  
and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the  
protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.

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.

Put another way, we always tried to design each new protocol to be  
both useful in its own right and a building block available to others.  
We did not think of protocols as finished products, and we  
deliberately exposed the internal architecture to make it easy for  
others to gain a foothold. This was the antithesis of the attitude of  
the old telephone networks, which actively discouraged any additions  
or uses they had not sanctioned.

Of course, the process for both publishing ideas and for choosing  
standards eventually became more formal. Our loose, unnamed meetings  
grew larger and semi-organized into what we called the Network Working  
Group. In the four decades since, that group evolved and transformed a  
couple of times and is now the Internet Engineering Task Force. It has  
some hierarchy and formality but not much, and it remains free and  
accessible to anyone.

The R.F.C.’s have grown up, too. They really aren’t requests for  
comments anymore because they are published only after a lot of  
vetting. But the culture that was built up in the beginning has  
continued to play a strong role in keeping things more open than they  
might have been. Ideas are accepted and sorted on their merits, with  
as many ideas rejected by peers as are accepted.

As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of  
openness, especially in industries that have rarely had it. Whether  
it’s in health care reform or energy innovation, the largest payoffs  
will come not from what the stimulus package pays for directly, but  
from the huge vistas we open up for others to explore.

I was reminded of the power and vitality of the R.F.C.’s when I made  
my first trip to Bangalore, India, 15 years ago. I was invited to give  
a talk at the Indian Institute of Science, and as part of the visit I  
was introduced to a student who had built a fairly complex software  
system. Impressed, I asked where he had learned to do so much. He  
simply said, “I downloaded the R.F.C.’s and read them.”


Stephen D. Crocker is the chief executive of a company that develops  
information-sharing technology.
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