Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/398

 Even the developed countries are not helped by policies that restricted participation to a bureaucratic elite. The real networks that I visited were built from the ground up. The most effective networks were built by people with problems to solve. If we want those networks to be interoperable, certainly a goal of the standards process, people building the networks have to be able to get the standards.

The concept of the standards haven is one way around the bureaucracies, but it is not a very productive way to solve the problem. While a few countries probably will post standards for their engineers, nobody had confirmed their intention to do so officially. Indeed, while Korea and India liked the standards haven concept, the idea was caught in the mire of their own bureaucracies. Ultimately, the standards haven concept is a temporary stopgap and a more permanent solution must come directly from the standards cartel. This is a problem crying for global leadership.

Availability of information is one of those fundamental human values that needs to be established as a conscious decision, a fundamental part of the infrastructure. Bruno was a stopgap, and even if a few people working on their own could come up with a new stopgap, what we need is a real solution.

Returning from the coffee shop, it was time to tackle a three-foot-tall pile of mail that had come while I was gone. Having the SnailMAIL to process in a batch let me have a little fun.

As I sorted my mail, I pulled out all the postage-paid cards and put them into a stack, throwing everything else into the recycle bin. I then performed triage on the stack, dividing them up into things I wanted information on (a total of two cards), things I didn't care about, and companies and interest groups I didn't like.

The cards for the bad organizations were left blank and deposited in the nearest post box. Voting with postage-paid cards was a form of economic democracy I learned from my politically-active mother. Over time, individual action can snowball and even the bulkiest bureaucracies will give way.