mark nottingham

Are Internet Standards Competitive or Collaborative?

Tuesday, 16 July 2024

Standards Internet and Web

This post is part of a series, The Nature of Internet Standards.

It’s often assumed that standards work is inherently competitive. After all, the legal reason for Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs) to exist at all is as a shelter from prosecution for what would otherwise be anti-competitive behaviour.¹

That description evokes images of hard-fought, zero-sum negotiation where companies use whatever dirty tricks they can to steer the outcome and consolidate whatever market power they can.

And that does happen. I’ve experienced that testosterone-soaked style of standardisation in the ’00s when IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle attempted to standardise Web Services (i.e., machine-to-machine communication using XML) at the W3C. It did not end well.²

Thankfully, the reality of modern Internet and Web standards work differs greatly from that experience. While companies are still competing in relevant markets, and still use standards as strategic tools – and yes, sometimes they behave badly – both the culture and processes of these bodies are geared heavily towards collaboration and cooperation.

In part, that’s due to the history of the Internet and the Web. Both were projects born from collaborative, non-commercial efforts in research environments that reward cooperation. Early on, these attitudes were embedded into the cultures of both the IETF and W3C: Web Services was an anomaly because corporate interests brought that effort from the ‘outside.’

This tendency can be seen in everything from the IETF’s ‘we participate as individuals, there is no membership’ ethic to W3C’s focus on building a positive working environment. When someone attempts to steer an outcome to benefit one company or appears to act in bad faith, people notice – these things are frowned upon.

Internet and Web standards work also tend to attract people who believe in the mission of these organisations – often to the point where they identify more with the standards work than their current employer. In fact, it’s not uncommon for people to shift from company to company over their careers while still working on the same standards, and without appreciably changing their perspectives on what the correct outcomes are.

As a result, long-term standards participants in these bodies often build strong relationships with each other: through years of interaction, they come to understand each other’s points of view, quirks of behaviour, and red lines. That doesn’t mean they always agree, of course. However, those relationships form the backbone of how much of Internet standards work gets done.

Another factor worth mentioning: as SDOs have matured, they’ve created increasingly elaborate process mechanisms and cross-cutting reviews of aspects like security, privacy, operability, and more. In practice, these checks and balances tend to reward collaborative work and discourage unilateral behaviour.

All of this means that it’s best to think of these as communities, rather than mere gatherings of competitors. That’s not to say that they always get along or even that they’re healthy communities – sometimes things get very bad indeed.³ I’m also not suggesting that companies do not behave competitively in Internet standards: it’s just that competition happens in a more subtle way. Rather than trying to use standards as a way to direct markets towards themselves, companies more often compete in implementation and delivery – building value on top of what’s standardised.

And, to be clear, this is specific to Internet-related standards bodies; other places often still follow the ‘old ways,’ from what I gather.

An Aside on Collaboration and Innovation

All of this might sound counterintuitive if you take the view that innovation primarily comes from deep within companies that produce things – firms that cannily use interoperability to consolidate their market share, or grudgingly share their valuable work with others under pain of anti-trust prosecution. Carliss Baldwin and Eric von Hippel persuasively argue against this view in Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation:

We have seen, and expect to continue to see, single-user innovation and open collaborative innovation growing in importance relative to producer innovation in most sectors of the economy. We do not believe that producer innovation will disappear, but we do expect it to become less pervasive and ubiquitous than was the case during most of the 20th century, and to be combined with user and open collaborative innovation in many settings.

Most interestingly, they point out that decreasing design and communication costs brought by – wait for it – technical innovations like the Internet mean that open collaboration becomes a viable model for innovation in more and more cases.

In short, under the right circumstances, success becomes more likely when cooperating as opposed to attempting to innovate on your own. Open collaborative efforts like Internet standards can be a significant source of innovation, and in some circumstances a distinctly superior one. I think this is an important point to consider when contemplating innovation and competition policies.

Some Less Obvious Implications

The collaborative nature of modern Internet standards work has some interesting implications, and some can be seen as downsides – or at least features that we need to be well aware of.

Most importantly, it means that SDOs have distinct cultures with values and norms. This isn’t surprising to anyone familiar with organisational theory, but it can seem exclusionary or even hostile to those who don’t share them. Outsiders may need to do considerable work to get ‘up to speed’ with those values and norms if they want to be successful in these bodies. Even then, they may face roadblocks if their goals and values aren’t aligned with that of those already entrenched in the organisation.

It also means that these bodies are opinionated about the work they take on: Internet SDOs don’t typically ‘rubber stamp’ proposals from outside. Because they are communities with context and specific expertise, what they produce is ‘flavoured’ by the values and even tastes of those communities. Again, this can be difficult to understand for those who just want their proposal standardised. This factor also limits the ability of these organisations to address problems outside their areas of expertise: they’re not generic venues for any kind of standards work (a more common model elsewhere).

The clubby nature of collaboration can sit very uneasily with the competitive aspects that are inevitably still present in much of this work. Outcomes are heavily influenced by who shows up: three router vendors collaborating well are likely to come up with something that works well for router vendors. However, if the work negatively affects other parties who show up later and try to change things, integrating their viewpoints can be challenging, because they will be seen as going against an established (albeit smaller) consensus (see also the previous discussion of the limits of openness).

When there is contention over how to apply values to standards work (or over the values themselves) a collaborative SDO can struggle to manage the resulting confrontation, especially if their culture is primarily oriented towards ‘friendly’ engagements. For example, many still harbour significant bitterness regarding the well-documented disagreement about DRM in HTML and how it was resolved. The Do Not Track specification failed because the participants couldn’t agree on the meaning of the term, and because adoption of Internet standards is voluntary. It remains to be seen whether the very divergent views of the advertising, publishing, and privacy communities can be reconciled in more recent efforts.

Ultimately, these factors put pressure on the SDO’s governance: a well-governed venue will assure that collaboration functions well, while avoiding capture by narrow interests and assuring that all affected parties have an opportunity to participate – even if they aren’t a good ‘cultural fit’.