Note on Code Swaraj
protocols were based on things that actually worked, whereas OSI was based on corporate agendas.
My contributions to the Internet protocol suite were minor, but I spent a lot of time at the IETF, and ended up working on governance issues. I was part of a group of radicals that wrested ultimate control of the organization away from government sponsors at the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies, who were still appointing our supervisory bodies such as the Internet Architecture Board, and moving towards a bottom-up model of governance.
We held fast to core principles, such as people attending meetings represented their own views, not their employers. Anybody could participate, there was not application or membership. I also spent considerable time on the issue of how to produce the documents that made up the IETF database, working with my colleague Marshall T. Rose on an authoring language for standards that is still used today.
The Internet won the fight against OSI. What we found is whenever there was a seemingly intractable problem that could not be solved, our open network always yielded a solution when some random graduate student would come up with a better way of doing things. The Internet scaled beyond on our wildest dreams, but to our credit we took pains not to stand in the way of that growth. The OSI contingent didn’t learn that lesson, and they are now a footnote in history.
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Code swaraj has been real for the Internet, though we are now increasingly facing walled gardens. If you use Linux, you can see how your computer operates, but you can’t view the source code for your iPhone. The protocol specs for the net are open, but increasingly, services have migrated towards massive centralized cloud services. We continue to battle over net neutrality, yet much of the Internet remains open, and we must fight to keep it that way. Still, the Internet is very much under attack with fake news, abusive bots, and many more symptoms of an attempt to subvert the net and close it up.
We must also set our sights higher than an open net, we must enforce those same principles to other areas of our lives. Code swaraj also applies to the law. How can we be a true democracy when access to the laws by which we choose to govern ourselves is incomplete, technically deficient, and expensive? Even lawyers suffer today from antiquated systems put up by vendors, such as the
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