Standards are a farce

Today (October 14) is "World Standards Day", celebrating the founding of the ISO, also known as the "International Standards Organization". It's a good time to point out that people are wrong about standards.

You are reading this blog post via "Internet standards". It's important to note that through it's early existence, the Internet was officially not a standard. Through the 1980s, the ISO was busy standardizing a competing set of internetworking standards.

What made the Internet different is that it's standards were de facto not de jure. In other words, the Internet standards body, the IETF, documented things that worked, not how they should work. Whenever somebody came up with a new protocol to replace an old one, and if people started using it, then the IETF would declare this as "something people are using". Protocols were documented so that others could interoperate with them if they wanted, but there was no claim that they should. Internet evolution in these times was driven by rogue individualism -- people rushed to invent new things with waiting for the standards body to catch up.

The ISO's approach was different. Instead of individualism, it was based on "design by committee", where committees were dominated by Big Government and Big Corporations. They standardized how protocols should work first, then implemented them second -- the opposite order from the Internet. They created something so complex that it could never be correctly implemented.

The group's name, by the way, was called "OSI" or "Open Systems Interconnect". The only reason most people have heard of this name is because of the OSI model. It's important to note that everything they know about the OSI model is wrong. What they think they know about the "Network" and "Transport" layers is what they know about IP and TCP respectively, and not what OSI designers originally intended. What they know about the Session, Transport, and Application layers is even worse: it's completely wrong, often specifying the opposite way things work in the Internet TCP/IP world. The standard "OSI Model" survives because it's a "standard" even though it's irrelevant in every way that something can be irrelevant.

However, while the model survives, almost the entire suite of OSI protocols have failed. We don't have a "connection oriented network protocol", for example. These standard protocols do exist, but in isolated places on the Internet. For example, the power grid runs a lot of stuff on port 102, the OSI standard "Transport" on top of TCP/IP. Since those things are based on ASN.1, they are full of buffer-overflows and easily hackable.

Standards are ultimately the modern form of fascism, where authoritarian people insist on subjugating everyone to a single set of rules. So, on October 14, I'm going to celebrate the demise of OSI, and the historic success of the Internet in the face of coordinated action by standards bodies to suppress it.