ISO this

Recent events have shown the power of intel­lec­tual prop­erty in the online space. A few weeks ago, Microsoft ran into some hot waters over a patent related to patents. This week brings up a new set of chal­lenges as the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium fights attempt to raise licens­ing fees on crit­i­cal ISO stan­dards. While the EOLAS issue rep­re­sents some prob­lems for a small seg­ment of the Inter­net (plug-ins in web browsers), the ISO effort stands to under­mine the Inter­net as a whole, mov­ing forward.

The back story on this is that the ISO is an inter­na­tional body that cre­ates stan­dards. In the case of the recent action, the ISO has cre­ated three crit­i­cal stan­dards: one that tells how to set a coun­try code (ISO-3166), another that sets how to iden­tify lan­guages (ISO-639) and one to spec­ify cur­ren­cies (ISO-4217). His­tor­i­cally, the ISO has levied fees from peo­ple who wanted to buy a copy of the stan­dard but made their imple­men­ta­tion free to everyone.

Buck­ing the trend of mak­ing all stan­dards roy­alty free, the ISO is now con­sid­er­ing levy­ing fees for imple­ment­ing these three crit­i­cal stan­dards cov­er­ing codes for lan­guages, coun­tries, and cur­ren­cies. While the last one will have less of an impact, the first two could impede the devel­op­ment of a world wide web, as they sit at the core of any inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion effort on the Inter­net. Not only do they affect the web but they also have a poten­tial impact on every sin­gle facet of the Internet.

For exam­ple, RFC 1591, which explains how domain names are orga­nized points to one of the doc­u­ments, ISO-3166. If the net was to act with­out that fee-levying, the whole domain name sys­tem would have to be redesigned to avoid using domain names end­ing with coun­try codes like .uk or .fr. Every coun­try would then have to accept a new set of stan­dards and then imple­ment them. The cost of such an under­tak­ing alone would prob­a­bly com­pletely take any value out of the Inter­net for decades to come.

Basi­cally, the three stan­dards in ques­tion are so embed­ded in the fab­ric of the Inter­net that, with­out them, the Inter­net could die. As such, one could argue that such stan­dards give the ISO a vir­tual monop­oly over the Inter­net and that’s cause for concern.

Cou­pled with the recent action by Verisign and sub­se­quent reac­tion by many orga­ni­za­tions (ISC, IAB and ICANN all denounced the action), it rep­re­sents a trou­bling trend: large orga­ni­za­tions try­ing to kid­nap the Inter­net in the search for more profits.

Hope­fully, some groups are look­ing out for us but be aware that the price of such free­dom is eter­nal vig­i­lance (with apolo­gies to Thomas Jefferson).