In Inventing the Internet (1999), Janet Abbate ends her chapter on networking standards with the caution that “technical standards are generally assumed to be . . . of little historical interest” (p. 179). Though it makes only passing reference to Abbate, Andrew Russell's Open Standards and the Internet Age: History, Ideology, and Networks can be read as taking up Abbate's implicit challenge. “The very passion with which stakeholders contest standards decisions,” Abbate noted, “should alert us to the deeper meanings beneath the nuts and bolts” (p. 179). Russell, drawing on archives, oral histories, and interviews, takes us down to the Internet's nuts and bolts to show how they achieved their interchangeable threads.
It is not only in its standards that the Internet can deem history passé. The idea that the digital “revolution” made the past irrelevant is (if my students are anything to go by) widely held. But Open Standards argues to the contrary that the development of open-standard setting reflects less an “inflection point” on a path from closed to “open” than an interregnum of “autocratic design” followed by a “return to old ways of doing things” (p. 230). Thus in his detailed account and polemical approach Russell impressively sets the modern business of digital communications within, rather than outside, historical analysis, though he takes a few swipes at conventional business history along the way.
To fathom standards in the age of the Net, Russell argues, we need first to dive into the standard-setting processes of the nineteenth century and the subsequent emergence of the American Standards Association (ASA) from the earlier American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), which in turn reflected its earlier British counterpart, the BESC. (Essays on standards tend to be laden with acronyms, as do essays on Internet infrastructure. Combine the two and you wallow in alphabet soup.) To follow this story, Russell argues, business historians must abandon their reliance both on economist Ronald Coase's dichotomy of market and hierarchy and on Alfred Chandler's assumption that the great whales of business history will account in their wake for the contribution of the minnows. Many readers of this journal, I suspect, will feel that business historians, at least in recent years, have been more nuanced and encompassing, but that should not prevent them from giving Russell a hearing.
Russell recognizes that he cannot discuss standards, particularly communications and computational standards, without discussing the whales, and the great behemoths of Bell/AT&T and IBM tower over this story. Yet he shows that the corporate ambitions of both could be checked by the minnows. The commitment of their engineers to professional standards restrained the unquestioning pursuit of employers’ goals. Thus Russell explores professional networks, which, as much as the digital networks and the corporate hierarchies, account for “open” standards. But human networks are more complex structures than technical ones. The ASA and similar bodies delegated standard setting to numerous interlocking committees that, by opening themselves to the conflicting interests of both engineering and business, risked creating standards chaos as much as resolving it.
Despite the checks of autonomous standard-setting institutions, the behemoths reached such a size that governments also became involved, aware that standards could as easily extend monopoly as constrain it and that standards committees were prey to various forms of capture. Here Abbate's caution that “standards can be politics by another means” becomes most clear and helps illuminate the divergence of European and U.S. approaches (p. 179). The former in large part reflected European suspicions of monopolistic corporations (particularly American ones), and the latter, U.S. suspicion of government intervention, particularly in the European state-run postal, telegraph, and telephone services (PTTs). (Russell is admirably committed to making his story of the Internet an international one.)
The convergence of computing and communications threw prevailing standards into further turmoil. As Bernard Strassberg of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission noted, “The first awareness we had of the fact that computers and data processing had something in common with communications started in early [19]65” (p. 138). By that time, however, the European PTTs were wary of anything that might bring AT&T into their markets, and fledgling computer companies were equally worried that, if it could control networking standards, IBM would only further its dominance.
In their defense, Europeans turned primarily to international standard-setting processes, backing the International Standards Organization (ISO), which created the confusingly acronymed OSI—a subcommittee on Open Standards Interconnection—to harmonize early networking, whereas in the United States, the challenge of networking was most aggressively embraced by the U.S. Department of Defense, whose Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) relied more on military ideals of “command and control” than on any notions of openness. In Russell's account, OSI attempted to design by committee and the resulting camel never walked confidently. In contrast, ARPA focused on the practicalities of implementation, allowing “autocratic” rather than democratic design to set standards for its network, the ARPANET, which was overseen by the Department of Defense, standards that were then advanced by the National Science Foundation when it took over management of this network, which was then rechristened NSFNet and which ultimately emerged as the autonomous Internet. This triumphant path, in the oft-repeated words of MIT scientist David Clark, rejected “kings, presidents, and voting” and espoused “rough consensus and running code” (p. 230). But, Russell argues, it was only after the hierarchies of ARPA and the NSF had established these de facto standards that it was possible to return to the conventional standard setting of the past, which ironically the Europeans had favored, though this return has since been portrayed as a linear passage to an unprecedented future.
Russell's argument neatly challenges both conventional history and attempts to rule the past irrelevant. Nonetheless, its stark contrasts underplay such things as the nonmilitary contribution of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and the military contribution of NATO in Europe. Moreover, his suggestion that with the public Internet we have returned to the “open” processes of the past deserves caution. He overlooks, for example, the way that control over Internet names and addresses was taken out of U.S. government hands. In 1998 with a famous “hack,” John Postel, one of the Net's founding figures, summarily instructed two-thirds of the operators of “nameservers” to change the way they handled Internet addresses—and they did. Clark's “rough consensus” could evidently still be autocratic and Russell's “openness” remarkably closed. In Postel's defense, Vince Cerf, another foundational figure, argued, “There's no substitute for an enlightened despot,” an argument raised to a higher plane by those (Wikipedians among them) who admiringly call Postel the “God of the Internet” (p. 259).
