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It was August 1991, and I was sitting in a cafe in Geneva, Switzerland, having lunch with Tony Rutkowski, a man who was a senior official in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) but whom nobody could seem to pin an exact title on. While many called him the General Counsel of the ITU (for reasons that will become apparent), Tony prefered to refer to himself as "Counsellor to the Secretary-General," a title with enough ambiguity to serve his purposes.

Tony and I were celebrating a minor palace coup, a year in the making and the result of a bizarre partnership. How all this came to be can be traced to my propensity to flame.

For several years. I've been complaining about the high cost of international standards documents published by the ITU and other international standards groups. After all, I write professional reference books for a living and these documents are my raw materials.

At first the flames started as simple whining, but soon they grew to full-fledged diatribes in publications running the gamut of technical sophistication from Data Communications to Connexions. I got lots of quotes from illustrious people like Jon Postel, Editor of the Internet Request for Comments (RFCs), who explained that keeping international standards away from "random people" was hurting their acceptance. The gestation time for software based on Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) serves as ample illustration of Postel's point.

The fabled power of the press produced an effect about as pronounced as, say, an editorial in favor of truth and beauty. An occasional nod from a passing reader, but no cries of outrage.

As a sanity check, I posted a note on the Internet asking if anybody else thought that the inaccessibility of international standards was hindering technical progress. This hit a nerve. In fact, the resulting firestorm surprised even survivors of historically notable dialogues such as "should pornography be distributed on the net?"