2 The History of the Internet - Mutualism in Action
2.6 The Web: Mutualism in Action
2.7 How Mutualism Gets Results
2.7.1 Mutualism
in Action: Sun Microsystems
3.1 How Mutual Is the Internet Today?
3.2 Net.Governance: From IANA to ICANN
3.3 Breaking Standards, Making Money
3.3.2 The
Internet Service providers
3.4 Staying Mutual In a Digital World
3.4.1 WAP:
A way to avoid mutualism
4.2 Support the standards-setting process
4.4 Invest in Next Generation Technologies
4.4.1 Java:
How the Private Sector Blew It
4.5 Accept the limits of the commons
5.1 How the Net Supports Mutualism
5.3 Problems for co-ops: and some solutions
5.3.2 Geographical
reach: think globally, sell locally
5.3.3 Customer
focus & Market responsiveness
5.3.4 Attracting
investment and financial backing
5.3.5 Adaptability
to changing circumstances
6.2 Mutualism in the New Economy
6.2.1 The
Virtual Co-operative
7 Conclusion: The Tragedy of the E-commons
8 Appendix: The Five Pillars of e-Mutualism
‘A spectre is haunting the Internet – the spectre of commercialism. All the powers of the old Internet have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: USENET groups, academics, IETF members and civil libertarians.’
(after Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The
Communist Manifesto[1])
It may seem that linking the Internet and the World Wide Web with the political approach that has come to be called ‘new mutualism’[2] is the worst sort of bandwagon jumping, an opportunistic attempt to give some spurious credibility to yet another variant of Third Way politics.
I trust that I can demonstrate that this is not the case. If anything the Internet is the biggest successful experiment in mutualism ever attempted, and it is laissez-faire free-market capitalism which has sought to gain unjustified credibility by association. After all, how many other co-operatives have almost three hundred million members, doubling in size every eight to nine months, or handle over five trillion pounds of trade each year?[3]
I will argue that the Internet is important to the debate about mutualism for two reasons. The first is that the Net itself is an excellent example of the power of mutualism, having been created and managed through the co-operative effort of tens of thousands of individuals and organisations. Second, the Net provides an infrastructure on which mutual organisations can thrive, opening up new potential for fast, effective communication and co-ordination of action, collaborative and consensus-driven decision making and global action. While the co-operative movement finds itself rather unfashionable with politicians and economists – ‘perceived as old-fashioned and marginal’, as Ian Hargreaves puts it[4] - the Internet is both fashionable and central to global economic development. Tying the co-ops and the Net together through their shared mutualist underpinnings is therefore a useful reminder of the value of co-operation.
In making this case it will be necessary to review the history of the Net and its underlying technology. This is generally considered an error in a political pamphlet, whose readers are assumed to be technophobes and scientific illiterates. However the Net has made us all geeks[5] under the skin, and I am sure that those who are interested in mutualism will find the technical aspects worth wading through.
We will begin with a general overview of the history and development of the Internet, making its mutualist underpinnings clear. We will then look at the current state of the Net and at the impact of commercialisation on the public space behind our computer screens. This will lead to a discussion of ways in which the ‘old’ Net can be preserved, and what action could be taken by Government and others.
Finally, we will explore ways in which the mutual Internet can provide a basis for other co-operative endeavours, concluding with a discussion of the wider lessons that can be drawn from the Internet for the mutualist project.
Bill Thompson, Cambridge, March 2000
bill@dial.pipex.com
Mutual endeavour has shaped our world, and mutualism, the belief that ‘individual and collective well-being is obtainable only by mutual dependence’[6], underpins family life, relationships and society. Our ability to work together on joint enterprises is the basis of our survival as a species. While capitalism may provide an economic model which privileges the individual and private ownership of the means of production, co-operation is still as important as competition for our survival and development.
We are also in the middle of a revolution as profound as the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. While philosophers debate the likely impact of the Internet and conclude that ‘the truth... lies somewhere between the fears of the Neo-Luddites and the hopes of the Technophiles’[7], we observe that the Internet is changing the way we shop, learn, find entertainment, work and do business. Everything seems to be changing, and we look to the Internet to underpin a new economy and to facilitate a new model of social organisation, to take us beyond post-industrial capitalism and into a new age.
In doing so we are relying on a co-operative enterprise to enable capitalism once more to reinvent itself. The history and current success of the Internet is a concrete demonstration of the power of co-operation and the effectiveness of mutualist thinking. Within the heart of the United States military-industrial complex a group of computer scientists, academics, bureaucrats and politicians managed to spend several billion dollars building a distributed network that had no control, no centre and no real function other than to satisfy their own desire to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Now that same network provides the infrastructure for an economic and social revolution.
Marx would be proud of the irony of the situation – but he would also observe that capital has never let philosophical abstraction or inherent contradictions stand in its way before, and shows no sign of doing so now. If capital needs the Net in order to survive, then it will take it and use it, whatever the history or underlying principles behind its growth and development. The mutualism that lay behind its development could easily be swept away in the rush to develop this new economic frontier.
In considering the relationship between mutualism and the Internet I have been largely guided by Peter Kellner’s argument, put forward in the first pamphlet in the current series from the Co-operative Party[8].
Seeking an alternative term to the sadly discredited ‘socialism’[9] he proposed mutualism, claiming that it is ‘not an ideology in the Marxist or free market sense’[10] but is instead ‘a doctrine that regards society as organic rather than mechanical.’[11]
Mutualism is grounded in the idea that we should have regard to other people and their needs, and that we can achieve more when working together than we can acting as selfish individuals. It is also, at least in Kellner’s formulation, a pragmatic approach to politics, allowing for a degree of flexibility that doctrinaire adherents of other positions on Left or Right would find unacceptable. Some see it as the principle underlying the Third Way, but it is not necessary to make this claim to appreciate that mutualism and mutual responsibility provide a foundation for arguing for a fairer, more inclusive society.
The Internet - or the ‘Net’- is the name given to the world’s largest co-operative system: a collection of interconnected computer networks that between them provide access to over sixty million computers used by over 250 million people[12].
The core capability of the Internet can be simply put: it moves bits around. Bits, the ones and zeroes used to express all computerised information, are the material from which the digital world is constructed. A music CD is a collection of approximately 5.5 billion ones and zeroes[13], all in the right order – it can be decoded by a CD player and appropriate equipment to produce a pattern of sound vibrations.
The Internet was developed to move bits and to do so reliably. It was not designed to do so rapidly, although current technology gives us the ability to ship tens of millions of bits per second over fibre-optic cable, and even a PC with a modem can send and receive tens of thousands of bits per second.
The Internet is often presented as a triumph of the free market, as if the whole thing was designed, developed and run by private enterprise. In fact the Net has only become a predominantly commercial environment in the past five years. It was largely built with government money, mostly in the form of military contracts for research in computer science in the US and Europe[14]. The Net is a product of the military-industrial-academic complex, a large-scale attempt to build a computer network to which any sort of computer could be linked and which would support all forms of collaborative and distributed working. It succeeded precisely because the money was there to do what worked rather than what would generate a return on investment. Instead of trying to generate competitive advantage from the network, the engineers working on it cared only that it carried on working. This lack of commercial impetus meant that the early Internet developed in such a way that it was able to expand rapidly and to cope with several generations of technical evolution without needing to be substantially re-engineered.
The Internet as we currently know it was created on January 1st 1983 when several existing computer networks around the world linked themselves together for the first time. The most important of these interconnected networks (the source of the name ‘Internet’) was the ARPANET, an experimental network that had been established in the United States in 1969 and which had grown, by the time it joined the Internet, to connect 113 sites in the US and Europe[15].
The creation of the original ARPANET was far from a co-operative venture, but it rapidly became one. The ARPANET was set up with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense at a time when the US military was concerned about how they would continue to communicate following a nuclear attack.[16]
Work carried out at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in the UK and by the Rand Institute in the United States had demonstrated that the computer-computer links at the time, which relied on using a fixed telephone line to establish a connection between the two systems, were vulnerable because if a link was broken there was no way to re-establish a connection without losing data that was in transit at the time. Research lead to the development of ‘packet switched circuits’, where messages between any two computers were broken down into small sections or ‘packets’ and send over a grid or network of connections between the various computers in a system.
Packet switching offered many advantages. The physical network which connected the computers provided multiple paths between any two computers, so if one link was broken then others could be used. Furthermore, the packets were reassembled at the recipient end and because each packet was numbered in sequence missing ones could be identified and re-sent. The resulting network could cope with failures.
Although the ARPANET was a military-funded project work was carried out by university academics and commercial partners[17] who were more interested in figuring out how to build better, faster and more resilient networks than in solving command and control problems for the army. They were also interested in discovering how the newly established computer networks could be used to help people work together.
One of the earliest programs written to use the ARPANET was ‘talk’. This simple program allowed two people sitting at separate computers which were linked over the network to take part in a conversation. Using talk one’s screen was split in half horizontally. What you typed appeared in the top half, and what your friend or colleague typed appeared in the bottom half as they typed it. As a result it was possible to have a ‘remote conversation’ over the network
As the ARPANET developed more and more applications were developed, ranging from electronic mail to online bulletin boards to ‘client-server’ systems which let a user at one computer get access to programs or information on other network-linked computers. The field of CSCW – Computer Systems for Co-operative Working – was established, and continues to grow to this day.
The nearest equivalent to the Internet in terms of complexity and number of interconnected devices of different sizes and specifications is probably the telephone network. Anyone looking at the global phone system today would express satisfaction that such a large number of privately-owned networks can work together so seamlessly: but even here the initial networks were publicly owned monopolies, working together through the mutually-grounded International Telecommunications Union[18].
Despite the fact that it covers the world, the Internet does not exist in any external way. It is not an organisation that one can join, it does not have a president or a chief executive or even a management committee. It is a co-operative venture, but one that is not owned by anyone, not even its members. It is no more than ‘a set of relationships between owners, workers and consumers.’[19]
In fact the Internet is best thought of as a joint technical undertaking: all the organisations and individuals who want to take advantage of the benefits which the Internet can offer must agree to conform to a set of technical requirements for connecting their computer networks to other computer networks.
The technical standards are agreed by a number of organisations, including national standards organisations like the British Standards Institute, and the International Standards Organisation. The World Trade Organisation has also expressed an interest.[20]
The Internet’s governing body is the Internet Society, a voluntary organisation whose membership consists of companies, government representatives and individuals[21]. The ISOC, as it is known, is in overall control of the standards setting process through a number of other organisations, most notably the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ISOC is the place where all the interests come together – and it is the body which outlines the requirements for getting connected to the Internet. It has no statutory power – only the ability to say what shall constitute an Internet standard – or RFC.
These requirements are not onerous: they are the basis for the interconnectedness that makes the Network both possible and valuable. And unlike externally imposed rules, the rules that make the Internet possible are generated from within, by open debate within a range of standards-setting organisations whose prescriptions are deemed to be mutually acceptable by the wider Internet community.
One of the most important aspects of the process is that Internet technical standards are not owned by anyone: they are intellectual property held in common, hence the description of them as ‘open standards.’ They can be changed only by mutual consent. They are published in a form which allows them to be used by anyone. And they are freely available online.
The casual – some might say ‘amateur’ – approach to standards development on the Internet is best demonstrated by the ‘Request for Comments’. Within the Net’s technical community standards are developed under the aegis of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a loose coalition of interested and technically proficient individuals, many of whom represent major corporations or governments.
A standard is proposed as a written document (available in electronic form on the World Wide Web, of course) and after it has been through appropriate consultation and review, it is published by the IETF as a numbered ‘RFC’.
This mechanism grew up in the early days of the ARPANET when the informal groups at the participating universities would meet for what were essentially technical seminars. Not wanting to appear dictatorial the person who took the minutes of the first meeting, Steve Cocker, a graduate student at UCLA, posted his notes as a ‘request for comments’ rather than an official record. The intention was that anyone with a legitimate view, one which they could defend, was invited to add their comment for general use.
The terminology stuck, as did the approach, based around the idea that the Net was and remains a mutual project and that all those who take part are therefore able to participate in its development and growth.[22]