engineering and standards

This page looks at bodies and processes relating to internet engineering standards.

It covers -

• standards
• the W3C
• engineering task forces
• national initiatives
• the ITU
• other bodies and communities

     network standards

The US National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) claims that there are around 800,000 formal global standards. The operation of the net is dependent on only a handful of those standards. Standardisation is not new: the American Library Association for example claims that the first "interoperability standard" was the standard catalogue card, adopted in 1877.

     the W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (aka W3C) is the international non-government organisation that creates web standards.

It dates from October 1994. The Consortium has recently released a seven point summary of its goals and operating principles.

     engineering task forces and boards

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the internet's main protocol engineering and development body. Formally established in 1986, it is an international nongovernment organisation that comprises network designers, operators, vendors and researchers. It has a number of Working Groups.

The IETF is guided by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which serves as technology adviser to the Internet Society (ISOC).

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) is responsible for technical management of IETF activities and the internet standards development process.

The IETF operates through over 100 working groups (often shortlived) that cover eight to ten functional areas. Most groups are readily established, with open participation, and wound up after achievement of the particular brief. The groups are managed by area directors.

Participation in the IETF and its groups is notably more relaxed than that of major electronics/telecommunications standards and regulatory bodies such as the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and ITU, with discussion characterised by MIT's Dave Clark as "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code". Formal membership is not required and of influential committee members are often volunteers from research organization. Recent IETF meetings have been attended by over 2,000 people, most of whom were not delegates of organisations. Much IETF activity involves online mailing lists.

     national initiatives

The US Next Generation Internet (NGI) Project is one of several national initiatives concerned with the 'next generation' of the internet, ie high speed bandwidth.

In January 2001 the EU announced that it would fund a 9.8 billion Euro development of the DataGrid project, a model for ultra high speed networks as the basis of sharing terabytes of information between research computers or your domestic toaster.

The Australian equivalent is GrangeNet, a high performance academic network linking selected institutions on the east coast.

     the ITU

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a United Nations agency concerned with coordination of global telecommunications networks and services. Each nation has one vote. The organisation has traditionally accommodated significant input from industry groups and technical specialists.

ITU deliberations have often been slow-moving and driven by political blocs, leading some observers to question whether the pace of technological innovation and changing tensions in the post Cold War era will erode the organisation's viability.

Its origins date from telecommunication agreements during the 1870s. Originally concerned with standards for the interconnection of national/regional telegraph networks, its mission has grown to embrace international agreements on satellite broadcasting, regimes for the allocation of radio frequencies (one reason why you can't start your own broadcasting system without government permission), international telecommunications traffic pricing, submarine cables and other communications infrastructure questions.

There is an intelligent introduction in The ITU In A Changing World (Boston: Artech 1988) by George Codding & Anthony Rutkowski, building on Codding's The International Telecommunications Union: An Experiment in International Cooperation (New York: Arno 1972).

James Savage's The Politics of International Telecommunications Regulation (Boulder: Westview 1989) and Coordinating Technology: Studies in the International Standardization of Telecommunications (Cambridge: MIT Press 1997) by Suzanne Schmidt & Raymond Werle are useful for global politicking.

The activities of the ITU are discussed in a more detailed profile elsewhere on this site, along with pointers to other studies.

    other bodies and communities

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) "is a non-profit making organization whose mission is to produce the telecommunications standards that will be used for decades to come throughout Europe and beyond". ETSI's US counterpart is the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Both work with - and essentially drive - technical committees of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

There is a perspective in Telecommunications in Transition: Policies, Services & Technologies in the EEC (Newbury Park: Sage 1994) edited by Charles Steinfeld & Johannes Bauer and the US Center for Global Standards Analysis (CGSA), The Development of Large Technical Systems (Boulder: Westview 1988) edited by Renate Mayntz & Thomas Hughes, Samuel Krislov's How Nations Choose Product Standards and Standards Change Nations (Pittsburgh: Uni of Pittsburgh Press 1967), the 2006 'From Setting National Standards to Coordinating International Standards: The Formation of the ISO' (PDF) by JoAnne Yates & Craig Murphy, Alexander Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press 2004) and The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities & the Battle for the LAN Standard (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2001) by Urs von Burg.

Technical Controversy in International Standardization (PDF), a 1993 paper by Suzanne Schmidt & Raymond Werle, questions myths about the absence of dissension among telecommunications engineers in contrast to policymakers at ICANN.

Andrew Russell's 2005 De Facto Standards in American Industry paper (part of The American System: A Schumpeterian History of Standardization series) explores creation of de facto standards within private firms and subsequent industry wide adoption, arguing that

this heterogeneity has been a recurrent source of controversy; but, far from being a weakness, it has been a source of flexibility and strength of American standardization.

Background on other standards bodies is here. 



    next page (addressing)