Standard Error

The Internet as we know it is built around a set of social conventions. I don’t mean social conventions of the form “don’t type e-mail messages in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS because it’s distracting,” though those certainly have their place: I mean a more rigid set of conventions, commonly referred to as standards. Essentially, they’re guidelines, which engineers follow when building technologies in order to make sure their inventions play nicely with the inventions of others.

The idea of a standard is nothing new. Long before the personal computer, there were standards for gasoline, so that car manufacturers could build cars and motorcycles and SUVs compatible with readily available gas, and standards for battery size and shape so that people who wanted to build battery-powered gizmos could do so with confidence.

What are some examples of computer standards? HTML (short for hypertext markup language), frequently tacked on to the end of web addresses, is one: It describes how web pages are supposed to be drawn up on the screen. Mp3 (short for MPEG-1 audio layer 3, where MPEG is short for Motion Picture Experts Group) is another, which explains how audio files can be compressed and decompressed, so that the makers of digital music players know how to program their devices.

All of the standards thus far mentioned share something in common: they’re “open” standards. Some of them, such as regulations for the permissible content of gasoline, are codified in law and maintained by the government; others are maintained by non-profit professional groups such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They’re all available for free: anyone who wants to can go on to the W3C web site and download the full specification for HTML; thus, anyone who wants to can write a web browser or a web page and expect it to work with the existing infrastructure.

Not all specifications are open in this way, however. The formatting instructions for Microsoft Word documents are locked up in a filing cabinet somewhere in Redmond, Washington, and Microsoft isn’t interested in sharing it. This means if you want to write or read Word files, you have two options: you can pay Microsoft, or you can guess. Most people take the first of these avenues, buying Word and never looking back. Others, such as those who created a program called Open Office, have had a good amount of success at reverse-engineering Word documents. However if Microsoft changes anything in the standard in a new version, the Open Office programmers will have to go back to the drawing board.

Open standards bear a large part of the responsibility for the success of the computer and the Internet. Because the rules for HTML were agreed upon on back in the early ’90s and made publicly available, the standard was quickly supported on a variety of computer platforms which were otherwise not interoperable. This meant that content producers could create consistently formatted information and distribute it broadly, and so the web was born.

The story is the same for mp3 files: once a mechanism for compressing music to a size easily distributable over dial-up modems had been standardized (mp3 was publicly released in 1994), dozens of innovators jumped in. They wrote mp3 playing software, built Internet-based distribution tools, and started to design CD players which supported the files. Six years later, the iPod was born.

But with closed specifications, such as the one governing Word, this kind of adoption cycle just isn’t possible. The upshot: lots of cell phones can view web pages, increasingly many can play mp3s, but if you want your phone to open Word documents, you have to pay for the privilege. The ones that are best at doing it are the ones that run a Microsoft operating system. Aside from this relatively petty convenience, the amount of innovation that has been stifled as a result is anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain: because many, many billions of dollars are locked up in Word documents, entering the word processing business is a difficult feat unless you happen to be on Microsoft’s payroll, and that means good ideas are often overlooked.

Apple, oft-billed as the counter-establishment alternative to monolithic Microsoft, isn’t guilt-free by any stretch: their code for copy-protecting music file is also kept under lock and key, and it’s the only language that the iPod understands. If you want to sell copy-restricted music that will play on an iPod, you’re out of luck unless you want to go through the iTunes Music Store.

It’s hard to judge the damage done by these restrictive practices: on the one hand, Apple is selling a lot of music, and Microsoft a lot of word processing software. But the thanks to the early open standardization of the web, the thought of its belonging to any one company now seems absurd to us—Facebook uses it, Google uses it, universities use it, and each in its own way. Only when we demand that Microsoft and Apple and others play nice with one another—only when they’ve made their specifications into open standards—will we come to see web-style explosive innovation in the various markets they control.



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.