Internet and Web
Every online interaction is a lopsided negotiation. For AI to truly work for us, we need more than just safety -- we need to start building true agency as a form of collective bargaining.
Standards work is notoriously hard to track. Let’s explore if grounding AI in working group records can make that history more accessible.
Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success.
The voluntary nature of Internet standards means that the biggest power move may be to avoid playing the game. Let's take a look.
The Open Web means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web's Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there.
Achieving policymakers' goals in coordination with Internet standards activity can be difficult. This post explores some of the options and considerations involved.
Is AI a useful option for policymakers who want to evaluate open standards? Let's take a look.
What can Apple do in the face of a UK order to weaken encryption worldwide? Decentralize iCloud, to start.
A new book explores an intriguing idea: that there are core processes in some platforms that naturally tilt the table towards being implemented in a single company.
The EU AI Act and emerging practice flip copyright’s default opt-in regime to an opt-out one. What effects is this likely to have on the balance of power between rights holders and reuse?
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores how we could start.
It's often assumed that standards work is inherently competitive. This post examines why Internet standards are often more collaborative than competitive, and outlines some implications of this approach.
The phrase 'Open Standards' is widely used but not well-understood. Let's take a look at what openness in standards is, with a focus on whether and how it helps to legitimise the design and maintenance of the Internet.
It’s common for voluntary technical standards developing organisations (SDOs such as the IETF and W3C) to make decisions by consensus, rather than (for example) voting. This post explores why we use consensus, what it is, how it works in Internet standards and when its use can become problematic.
It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.
No one requires tech companies or open source projects to use most Internet standards, and no one requires people to use them either. This post explains why the voluntary nature of its standards are critical to the Internet's health.
RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.
There are lots of ways to view what Internet standards bodies like the IETF and W3C do. This post examines them as a type of regulator and explores what that means for how they operate.
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.
The introduction of encrypted DNS is a natural step in the process of securing the Internet, but it has brought a considerable amount of controversy, because it removes a means of control for network operators -- including not only enterprises but also schools and parents. The solution is to move control of these services to the endpoints of communication -- for example, the users’ computers -- but doing so has its own challenges.
This post is mostly for folks who haven’t been following Web standards closely — especially IETF folks. If you have been, there’s probably not much new here (but feel free to poke holes!).
I had a lovely holiday weekend in Canberra with the family, without Web access. Perhaps I’ll blog about that soon — Canberra being in my opinion one of the nicest overlooked cities in the world — but that will have to wait. Going offline for a few days always brings a certain dread of what one’s inbox will hold when you get back, and this one was no exception.
As mentioned a while back, there are a variety of places where it would be useful to be able to describe the structure of a URI, rather than just convey a URI itself. I took a stab at this in the Link Header draft, and have also been working in the background with DeWitt Clinton, Joe Gregorio, Marc Hadley, Dave Orchard, and James Snell on a more general specification, URI Templates, the first draft of which we (finally!) got published today.
Lots of papers come and go over the years; take a look at any tech conference, online bibliographies (even subject-specific ones; Webbib is a favourite), and you’ll be inundated.
