By the middle decades of the twentieth century, the architects and engineers of communication networks understood that standardization provided a powerful strategy and tool kit for control. In the early twentieth century, AT&T chief engineer Bancroft Gherardi and his colleagues at the top of the Bell System hierarchy nurtured a corporate culture – and an ideology of standardization – that privileged stability and caution over radical technological or organizational change. The question of control, as we have seen, was at the core of tensions between telephone engineers in local Bell operating companies and AT&T executives in New York. Even as Gherardi and his fellow executives struggled mightily to centralize control, they faced a wide range of recalcitrant obstacles, such as resistance from the Bell operating companies and competing firms, adversarial state and federal regulators, and rapid changes in the scientific and technological foundations of their industry.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, critiques of AT&T’s style of centralized control arose from a variety of sources in American society. They are noteworthy as critiques – and not mere criticisms – because they were more elaborate than ordinary gripes about high rates or other aspects of telephone service. They did not only criticize the status quo; these critiques also began to build alternatives to the status quo that would take power out of the hands of Bell System employees and put it into the hands of a more diverse group of engineers, regulators, and users.

By the mid-1990s, the Internet’s advocates had learned to cast Internet history in a most flattering light. They downplayed its autocratic and closed world origins, belittled the work undertaken by their competitors in Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), and reimagined the Internet as an open system. In their revisionist hands, the Internet standards process became a novel form of distributed control and participatory democracy that emerged organically from the interactions of Internet engineers. Internet users, dazzled and enchanted by their sublime new toy, searched for secrets of the Internet’s astonishing success that they could apply in other realms. A chorus of academics and policy makers unwittingly latched on to an origin myth – that the Internet was a meritocracy, the product of “nerds” and “hackers” who collaborated through a decentralized and participatory design process.

The Internet standards process was an especially rich source of inspiration for legal scholars who offered new interpretations of legal philosophy, the process of innovation, and the role of nongovernmental and transnational regulatory regimes in the twenty-first-century global economy. In many cases, the lessons gleaned from the Internet success story flew in the face of accepted scientific and engineering practice – evidence, it would seem, that the Internet’s emergence truly marked a new kind of technology-enabled society. For example, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain generalized from his reading of the Internet’s architectural history to propose a “procrastination principle” built on the assumption that “most problems confronting a network can be solved later or by others.” This principle, Zittrain argued, “suggests waiting for problems to arise before solving them.”

Had he been able to visit America in 1900, Alexis de Tocqueville would have seen that Americans continued to “constantly form associations.” Americans continued to form commercial and manufacturing companies, as Tocqueville witnessed in the 1830s. Moreover, representatives of those companies formed additional associations to pursue common interests and ambitions. Through these combinations of associations, Americans developed technical standards to harmonize crucial aspects of industrial production.

Such voluntary industrial and corporate associations are by and large missing from histories of the late nineteenth-century American industrial economy. Histories of this era of American capitalism tend to focus on two general types of activity: disorganized and cutthroat competition in markets, and hierarchical command structures that developed within large corporations. Only recently have historians paid more attention to a third type of activity, which they conceptualize as hybrids of markets (which facilitate singular transactions) and hierarchies (which provide permanent structures for repeated transactions). William Cronon’s discussion in Nature’s Metropolis of the Chicago Board of Trade provides perhaps the best-known example of this hybrid form of coordination mechanism in the mid-nineteenth century. Cronon explains how the Board of Trade’s grading system decoupled grain ownership from its market price by creating standards of quality for different types of wheat. It thus functioned as an institution that created a level playing field for all grain merchants and prevented the possibility of control by a few powerful ones.

• Open process – let all voices be heard.

• Closed process – make progress.

• Quick process – keep up with reality.

• Slow process – leave time to think.

• Market driven process – the future is commercial.

• Scaling driven process – the future is the Internet.

By all accounts, David Clark’s plenary address at the July 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was a transformative moment in the history of networking. There was a palpable tension in the sessions leading up to Clark’s talk, which occurred at the end of the final session on the fourth day of a contentious i ve-day meeting. Clark, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, had been a leading member of the Internet technical community since 1976. Clark’s title, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball,” suggested uncertainty, but his “alternate title” – “Apocalypse Now” – better encapsulated the tone of his remarks. He used the occasion to cajole Internet engineers into paying more attention to technical problems that threatened the Internet’s continued growth and success. Like many people in the audience, Clark worried about the strains that the commercialization of the early 1990s was placing on the technical capabilities of the Internet. However, he was more deeply concerned by fundamental problems with the security of the Internet, as one of his slides made plain: “Security is a CRITICAL problem. Lack of security means the END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT.”

In the late afternoon of June 15, 1922, Herbert Hoover dropped in to a meeting of forty-four engineers who had assembled in a conference room at his Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. Hoover, who earned international fame as the “Great Humanitarian” by guiding relief efforts during World War I, turned his talents and energies toward the American economy when he was named secretary of commerce by Warren Harding in 1921. Hoover was, in the pre-Depression era, a living and breathing icon of the triumph of rationality, organization, and the progressive spirit of the engineering profession – the “engineering method personified” in the words of one admiring colleague.

Several of Hoover’s contemporaries – such as the social theorist Thorstein Veblen and the radical engineers Howard Scott and Morris Cooke – believed that technical expertise could reform society and engineer a new age of efficiency and abundance. But the meeting at the Department of Commerce was not some sort of revolutionary “Soviet of Technicians.” Instead, it was a meeting of the leaders of the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), a private group of engineers who had a more modest and pragmatic goal: to order the inconsistent patchwork of codes, tests, and standards used in American industrial practice. Although the AESC sought (and found) support from Hoover and other government officials, their method of work – consistent with the American mentality that Tocqueville observed in the mid-nineteenth century – depended on private cooperation to create standards that would, in turn, be adopted on a voluntary basis throughout American industry. Unlike their peers abroad, they did not depend on kings (Tocqueville’s “men of rank”) or presidents (“men of government”). Instead, their success would hinge on their ability to convince industrial managers and executives that industry standards would make business less wasteful and more profitable.

The formative technological innovations of the “open” digital age – electronic computers that exchange data through digital communication networks – did not, by themselves, drive the decentralization of authority in late-twentieth century global society. These technologies, the offspring of the stormy marriage of computing and communications, came into being as components of broader and more fundamental critiques of centralized control. Critiques came first; then came technical development, standardization, and, finally, social consequences.

In the United States and abroad, the computing industry was younger and more volatile than the communications industry. Telephone systems in all industrialized countries operated under the clear jurisdiction of national governments. The American arrangement, which featured the private administration of a national monopoly with the grudging approval of regulators, was abnormal (if not exceptional). American federal regulators in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s used their authority to prevent AT&T from entering the computer business. These restrictions were motivated, in part, by the hope that competition would flourish and bring with it a new era of innovation that would fuel the continuation of American technological leadership.

The architects of the twenty-first-century digital age proclaim that openness is their foundational value. Their work is exemplified in movements that embrace open science, open access publishing, open source software, open innovation business strategies, open education, and so on. President Barack Obama’s “Open Government Initiative,” announced on his first day in office in 2009, captured the collective spirit of these efforts: “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”

The ideology of openness, as it is articulated and practiced in the early twenty-first century, would have surprised the critic and historian of technology Lewis Mumford. In his 1964 essay, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” he wondered: “Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?” The advocates of openness, however, have not surrendered so easily. Instead, they sense the dawn of a radical, almost utopian transformation in which power hierarchies are flattened, secret activities are made transparent, individuals are empowered, and knowledge itself is democratized. They welcome innovation, thrive on diversity and change, insist on the sanctity of autonomy and freedom, and have an unqualified disdain for authority, restrictions, and gatekeepers.

The promise of data networking was evident to everyone who worked near the intersections of digital computer and communication technologies. The Bell Labs economist Jeffrey Rohlfs articulated the new conventional wisdom in a pioneering 1974 article, in which he based his “theory of interdependent demand for a communications service” on a forceful assertion: “The utility that a subscriber derives from a communication service increases as others join the system.” Rohlfs theorized and mathematized the lessons that the packet-switching researchers we met in Chapter 6 – such as Louis Pouzin, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Rémi Déspres, and Marc Levilion – understood intuitively: the value of a digital computer-communication network would reside primarily in its ability to facilitate and sustain interconnections on an ever-increasing scale.

As we have seen, these packet-switching researchers gained firsthand experience with the obstacles that prevented the universal adoption of new standards for data networking. As the “virtual circuit versus datagram” controversy described in Chapter 6 demonstrated, many technical disagreements mapped directly to conflicting strategic priorities and conflicting visions of control: telecommunications engineers used virtual circuits to keep more control inside the network, but computer engineers favored connectionless datagrams to shift control to the computers at the edges of the network. As positions hardened in the mid-1970s and it became clear that the argument was unlikely to be settled on technical merits alone, the network engineers we will meet in this chapter sought to create effective alliances that could constrain and direct the creation of international networking standards.

We have seen how organizations such as the American Standards Association (ASA) arose as creative responses to the status quo – that is, to the inadequacy of existing markets and hierarchies to provide effective mechanisms to coordinate technical standardization in American industry. The emergence of the “voluntary consensus” model of committee standardization, significant as it was, begs a related question: How did monopoly firms develop standards, and how did their standardization efforts fit within the collaborative, consensus-based model developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within trade associations and engineering societies?

Conventional answers to these questions point to the power of the managerial hierarchies that exist within monopoly firms. In the conventional view, monopolies create standards through a hierarchical, closed, and proprietary process as part of a broader strategy to erect barriers to entry and maintain centralized control over a given market or markets. They capture the network effects that standardization generates. Monopolies, in this view, act in a monolithic and almost petulant manner: their goal is to reduce variety, stifle outside innovations, lock in users, and preserve their control.