Open Protocols

Description

Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater:

"A protocol is like a language, convention, or standard and as such, use of it cannot be restricted, prevented or monetised any more than use of a word, gesture, or social code. The Internet is essentially a set of protocols (such as TCP/UDP, http, HTML), which leads to a fundamentally more democratic infrastructure. That need not have been so: in a parallel universe, Microsoft R&D invented the web and now every page is a visual-basic-enhanced word document, MS Office is the only tool for authoring them, and it costs $5000 for a licence and still look wrong on Firefox! The open protocols avoided that particular dystopia and in the early days provoked a great deal of optimism about how the new freedoms implicit in the Internet would be the basis for a new kind of society." (http://matslats.net/sites/matslats.net/files/Bendell%20and%20Slater%202017.pdf)