How the World Got Wired · The Constitution

The Gift

Now I have to tell you about the most important decision Cerf and Kahn made — the decision that, more than any other single thing, made the internet what it is.

They gave it away.

They did not patent TCP/IP. They did not start a company to sell licenses to it. They did not require permission, or royalties, or signatures, from anyone who wanted to use it. They published the paper in an open journal and let anyone in the world read it. They published their later revisions of the design as numbered documents — called Requests for Comments, or RFCs — that anyone could download and use, for free, forever.

This was a remarkable thing to do. They could have made themselves very rich. The companies they worked with could have tried to lock the protocols up. Instead — partly because the work had been paid for by the United States government, and partly because they believed in it — they let TCP/IP belong to everyone.

The decision had enormous consequences. Because TCP/IP was free, anyone could build a network that used it. A university in India. A company in Germany. A research lab in Brazil. A teenager in his basement. None of them had to ask permission. None of them had to pay. They just had to follow the rules in the paper, and their network would, automatically, be able to talk to every other network that followed the same rules.

This is the closest thing the internet has to a constitution. It is a short set of rules that everyone agrees to follow, voluntarily, because following them is how you get to join the global conversation. No one enforces it. No one is in charge of it. It just works, because everyone uses the same rules.

A different group of engineers in many countries did try, in the 1970s and 1980s, to design a “proper” set of rules through an official international committee. Their alternative was called OSI. It was supposed to be more complete, more elegant, more thorough than TCP/IP. Committees worked on it for more than ten years. By the time it was ready, TCP/IP had already taken over the world — because TCP/IP was simple, and free, and already running. A messy thing that exists almost always beats a beautiful thing that doesn’t.

This is another pattern worth remembering. The world is often built by the rough first thing that worked, not by the careful thing that was supposed to be perfect.

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