Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/13



The reason I visited 21 countries in six months, embarking on a technical voyage of discovery, can be traced back to an encounter I had with a platoon of bureaucrats. In June, 1991, I struck a deal with the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), coordinators of the very formal process which eventually results in standards such as the Blue Book: 19,000 pages of international recommendations which define the operation of data networks, telephone systems, and other aspects of communication.

The deal was that the ITU would give me a copy of the standards in the antiquated online format they used for text processing and that I would convert the standards into something the rest of us could deal with and publish the standards on the global Internet. Instead of charging obscene amounts of money for this information, the standards would be available to anybody at no charge. Organizations, rhetoric notwithstanding, don't work for such lofty goals as the dissemination of knowledge. The real reason for this breakthrough in standards distribution was that the ITU couldn't figure out how to convert their own data from the proprietary box they had built around themselves. My offer to do the conversion seemed an easy way out of a job they had estimated at U.S. $3.2 million. In return for converting the data and giving them a copy, I could publish on this Internet thing, this academic toy.

The ITU gave me half the data they promised and conveniently lost half the documentation to their Byzantine (both in age and in complexity) formatting system. Then, after a mere 90 days, the ITU abruptly cancelled distribution on the Internet. The academic toy, to the bureaucracy's horror, turned out to have over seven million people. They were shocked to see hundreds of thousands of ITU documents being accessed by thousands of people in dozens of countries.

Despite their abrupt cancellation of the project, the ITU still demanded a report. They wanted a certified bureaucracy document