Speaking of Standards

This week in New York City, Tim O’Reilly gave a keynote at the Web 2.0 event that I definitely put in my “must-see” category. Not because of anything visual… I mean, it’s just Tim standing on stage talking… but because of his message.

There is a war on out there on the Internet.

It’s a war between those who would like to keep the Internet as the open platform for innovation that it has been for decades… those who champion “The Internet Way” – and those who would like to return the Internet to the world of walled gardens from which it emerged. In his excellent piece published on Monday, “The War For The Web“, Tim speaks of the sides as “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” and, of course, “One Ring To Rule Them All”. He concludes with:

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it’s time for developers to take a stand. If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

This IS the battle that will frame the Internet in the next years. As I wrote a few months ago in ‘Of DDoSs and SPOFs: How Twitter and Facebook violate “The Internet Way”‘, the way of the Internet is to use “distributed and decentralized” services. That’s how email works… that’s how the “web” works… that’s what excites me about the promise of Google Wave – not just that it’s a great platform for collaboration (and as I show here, it is), but that the Wave protocol has been designed from the start to be about federation… to be about distributed and decentralized services.

This war is a large part of why I work here at Voxeo, where one of our core values is “Unlocked Communications“, where we are huge believer in open standards (and chair/co-chair many of the standards committees), where we do things like open source our Tropo cloud telephony platform (“The Cloud Must Be Open!”) and where, in contrast to Nuance and TellMe as Tim mentions at 13:22, we give away our speech recognition engine for free as part of our Prophecy IVR/application platform… that’s why I’m here at Voxeo. It’s a war for openness that I believe we must win!

But listen to Tim… and then ask yourself – which side of the war are you on?

The IETF today made a fairly major announcement:

The IAOC is pleased to announce the ancient and historic city of Beijing as the site for IETF 79 from 7 – 12 November 2010. This will be the IETF’s first meeting in China. The meeting will be held at the Shangri-La Beijing Hotel.

As noted, this will be the first time the IETF has met in China – and this announcement has not been without its share of controversy. Earlier during the negotiations with the hotel, the IAOC (the administrative arm of the IETF) asked the IETF committee for feedback on the venue and the terms under discussion. This set off a firestorm of discussion, as there was a clause in the hotel contract that allowed the hotel to terminate the proceedings if illegal content was discussed. The debate on the main IETF mailing list was extremely… um.. “vigorous” with all sorts of commentary around what constituted appropriate content, around “freedom of speech”, around censorship… and all the related topics. If you know anything about the IETF (or have been to an IETF meeting), you can appreciate the passion that this particular topic elicited.

In the end, the IAC reported that this specific clause was removed from the hotel contract:

During the course of contract negotiations with the hotel the community was asked via email lists and by survey about a specific provision in the contract. Your feedback guided us in our efforts. We are happy to report that the provision has been removed from the contract.

…

In response to concerns that the discussion of some IETF topics may violate the law, the IAOC has been assured by the Host that a normal IETF meeting can be legally held in China and that no pre-screening of material or monitoring of session content is required or will be done.

With that, the IAOC unanimously approved Beijing as the host of IETF 79.

Given that we have a Voxeo office in Beijing (which started with our Micromethod/SIPmethod team but has since expanded to include more folks working on all Voxeo products), we’re delighted that an IETF event will be happening there and look forward to having some of our folks attend.