Op-Ed Contributor - How the Internet Got Its Rules - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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We thought maybe we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information
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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.
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the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards
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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.”
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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.
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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
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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.