The veterans of the Internet-OSI standards war were no doubt wiser from the experience, but the millions of users who got on the Internet in the mid-1990s were oblivious to the fact that their new toy was the product of a protracted international struggle. For those who read the last issue of Telecommunications Policy in 1993, William Drake provided an insightful summary:

“The debate is not merely about the comparative efficacy of two sets of standards, but it is rather between two competing visions of how international standardization processes and network development should be organized and controlled.”

The religious, political, and military metaphors that participants used to describe the competition between the Internet and OSI confirm that this was no mere technical dispute. At the height of the “religious war” between TCP/IP and OSI, tensions within the IETF and IAB over architecture and organizational power created a “constitutional crisis.” This crisis, a divisive force in a community that had always prided itself on its attention to due process and consensus, forced engineers in the IETF and IAB to examine their core procedural beliefs.

In other words, strains in the technical architecture — the address space — prompted strains in the organizational architecture. Forged in the face of this crisis, the credo “rough consensus and running code” articulated a political philosophy, a style of network architecture and of engineering. While it is now common to see participants in the Internet standards community refer to the “rough consensus and running code” ideal, Clark’s rejection of alternative forms of decision making — kings, presidents, and voting — reminds us of the close links between network standards and international politics.

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the open and decentralized technical architecture of the Internet embodied the technical and organizational values of its design group. Internet architecture and organizations were created at the same time, by the same people, as part of an effort “to unite the community behind a single objective — to focus the effort and guarantee the continued growth of the Internet.” As the evidence in this article demonstrates, defining a single goal and then uniting the community behind it was no small feat.

These organizational and procedural problems intensified throughout the 1990s, and continue to haunt the IETF and IAB — as well as the broader reaches of information technology standards — today. The structure and process of Internet standards set precedents and influenced the development of subsequent efforts to set standards for digital networks in institutional imitators such as the World Wide Web Consortium, the Global Grid Forum, and, most recently, the Voting Systems Performance Rating. The Internet standards community not only introduced technological innovations; it also pioneered organizational innovations such as the use of electronic mailing lists to build consensus around technical work, a process open to all interested stakeholders, and the free and unrestricted distribution of standards.

As it embodied a new style of standardization, the Internet standards community constantly dealt with problems that stemmed from the tension between centralized authority and grassroots initiatives, as well as the rising influence of commercial values. Since 1992, IETF participants in multiple working groups and mailing lists have spent tremendous amounts of energy defining formal procedures for the IETF, to the point that many in the IETF feel that their technical work is suffering from a lack of attention. In light of its history, it seems certain that the IETF’s ongoing efforts to refine and reform its structure and process will dictate the future success of its standards. Organizational and political conflicts within standards bodies define the terrain within which effective collaborations can take place. Standards wars such as the Internet-OSI conflict provide ample research opportunities for historians who want to understand computers, networks, and the people who designed and used them.