Andrew L. Russell
Department of History and International Center for Standards Research
University of Colorado at Boulder
[email protected]

From “Kitchen Cabinet” to “Constitutional Crisis”:
The Politics of Internet Standards, 1969-1992

In light of the emergence of the Internet in the early 1990s, commentators such as Mitch Kapor celebrated the “Jeffersonian” potential for the Internet to mold a more democratic society and even, as Lawrence Grossman suggested, an “Electronic Republic.” More recently, authors such as Lawrence Lessig have pointed to the “end-to-end” architecture of the Internet as the most important enabling feature of this “democratizing” global infrastructure. End-to-end design principles rest on the broad deployment of open technical standards, such as TCP/IP. This broad deployment, in turn, requires a large number of geographically dispersed engineers and computer scientists to create and implement technical standards that they all agree to use.

This paper takes a closer look at the history of Internet standards between 1969 and 1992. By focusing on what Greg Downey refers to as “protocol labor,” I argue that the scientists who forged the technical standards and design philosophy of the Internet also embedded their political values into the Internet’s standards and architecture. This argument draws upon the work of Janet Abbate and Paul Edwards, who demonstrate that Internet technologies were not developed in some sort of social or cultural vacuum. My paper carries their analysis one step further by examining the changes in the Internet standards process and the growth of standards-making bodies in the face of an explosion in the number of people who wanted to participate. Viewed in this light, the history of Internet standards reveals an unshakable dedication among Internet leaders to such core democratic values such as transparent institutions, open participation, and due process.

I examine these political values by tracing the organizational history of Internet standards bodies, starting with Vint Cerf’s “kitchen cabinet” of advisors while he led DARPA’s Internet program in the late 1970s, and ending with a 1992 dispute over a technical standard between the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This dispute, a “constitutional crisis” in which the IETF asserted its right to approve Internet standards, convinced Internet architect David Clark to reconsider the virtues of the IETF’s procedural ideals. In his speech to a plenary session of the July 1992 IETF meeting, Clark delivered a phrase that would become the IETF’s motto and operating philosophy: “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”

Through a contextual analysis of the roots of the Internet’s constitutional crisis of 1992—an event mostly unexamined in existing Internet historiography—this paper places the creation and governance of the Internet within a set of discourses centering on technology and democracy in Cold War America. I suggest that the development of a “meritocracy” among Internet standards experts is a political expression of the community of “hackers” who built the protocols of a global communications architecture that continues to aid democratic movements worldwide. Finally, I hope to draw on the expertise of the ICOHTEC community to help me grapple with the international dimensions of Internet standards during this time period.