Exploring the Internet
The Internet has a wide community of users, but a convenient taxonomy splits them into flamers and firefighters. Flaming is easy to explain. You send a message and bingo, you've made 1,000 people all hit the delete key in their mail readers. The power to make so many people twitch is seductive and some people occasionally succumb. In fact, some succumb all too often.
The firefighters have a different motivation. Their happiness is inversely proportional to the size of their electronic inbox. Not everybody was terribly happy when their inboxes started filling with "me too," "I agree," and "another minor yet trivial point" variants on the first wave of reaction.
Dan Lynch, the founder of Interop Company, is a firefighter. He didn't want to see this situation continue forever, so he sent me a copy of a memo written by Tony Rutkowski at the ITU. Turns out Tony was doing the same sort of complaining I was, but was directing his comments internally to the huge ITU bureaucracy.
Tony and I exchanged a few e-mail messages and found we were in violent agreement: standards have to be widely available or the standards are irrelevant. We started trying to figure out what could be done about it.
Turns out that we agreed on another point. We both feel that the ITU has a fairly dubious basis for asserting copyright protection on standards, since a standard spends months (often years) wandering around the public domain as a working-group document before it ever becomes blessed as an official standard and is "published."
You can't make a speech to a crowded room and then, one week later, tell people that your speech contained valuable trade secrets. You can't publish a newspaper and then unpublish it. Once you give something away, it stays given away.
The lack of valid copyright protection is one argument for making standards more widely available, but there is a much more important one. If you believe, like Tony and I fervently did, that the ITU does valuable work, then the standards are an essential public good. Standards are laws and laws must be known to be observed.
Failing to make the standards widely available was, in the long run, going to make the work of the ITU irrelevant. Other standards-making bodies were promulgating standards, and despite its official
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