The future of the netroots: Why net neutrality is only one part of the puzzle

Hi, my name is Wes Morgan. I’m an online organizer with U.S. PIRG, currently based in Denver, CO. I graduated in 2003 from Calvin College with a degree in computer science (and a minor in Spanish). Currently I’m directing a program called Code for Change. Code for Change brings together young programmers (students and recent grads) to work on open source software projects that help build progressive infrastructure. For example, this summer we’ve been adding new features to CiviCRM, part of the CivicSpace project.

There are few things that give me more hope for the future of progressive politics in the U.S. than the Internet and the rise of the netroots. The fact that regular folks like us can use the Internet to speak out, take action, and organize others to do the same is amazingly healthy for democracy. We should hang on to this for dear life.

Sadly, as most good things are, the Internet is under attack by those who wish to bend it to their narrow special interest (usually profit-driven) purposes. Net neutrality is the label we’ve given to the fight against this attack, and it is critically important that we win it. U.S. PIRG has a page with information and actions you can take on net neutrality, and Mike Connery also has some great ways to help out in a recent post to Future Majority. However, when we define what we mean by “net neutrality,” we’re usually only talking about one aspect of what’s required to have a free and open Internet. I would argue that there are three equally essential pieces to this puzzle.

1. Open networks (traditional “net neutrality”)
2. Open standards governing how the networks operate (and interoperate with each other)
3. Open software implementations of those standards (open source)

More after the jump.

Take instant messaging as an example. To participate in the world of instant messaging, you have to have an account on AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, or a handful of other IM providers. You can’t send a message to your friends on a network other than the one you're on. In fact, with the exception of Yahoo and MSN, none of these networks can talk to each other. They run on the (for now) neutral Internet, so why is this? Because, with one exception which I’ll say more about later, the standards that govern how they work aren’t open. If you want to build a tool that interoperates with one of these networks, you have to reverse engineer the rules that govern how the network communicates (the protocol). That’s an expensive and fraught-with-legal-peril process that not many are willing to or capable of engaging in. (But some have, and there are some great third party IM clients for these networks as a result of their hard work.)

The world of instant messaging is a prime example of how a closed standard can render an otherwise open and neutral network completely closed for all intents and purposes. But, because the Internet itself is open, there’s nothing stopping us from creating a separate and more open IM standard and then using that on the Internet. Actually someone (or several someones more precisely) have already done just that. It’s called Jabber (more formally, XMPP), and it is the technology that Google chose to base its GTalk IM service on (this is the one exception I mentioned earlier). But then why haven’t we seen the explosion of interoperability and transparency around GTalk? It’s based on an open standard, so shouldn’t there be all kinds of innovation happening around it with lots of people setting up their own services and tools that enable GTalk users all over the globe to do new and different things we never dreamed possible with IM? We haven’t seen this with GTalk for one very good reason: While GTalk runs on an open network using an open standard as its protocol, its software implementation is closed. That brings us to the third piece in the “trinity of openness.”

Closed software implementations are a deal breaker just as much as closed (or non-neutral) networks and closed standards are. This one is a little tougher to explain, so I’ll use a hypothetical example. Let’s say I created a service that allowed GTalk users to IM with AIM users so that anyone running GTalk could add an AIM user to their contact list and start messaging away. How would someone do that in the GTalk client? What about the people who only access GTalk via the Gmail web application (the “Quick Contacts” sidebar)? There’s no way I could add these features to the very place they would need to be for anyone to know about them. That’s because the official Google client programs for GTalk are closed source. So while Google implements an open standard, access to the source code is unavailable and innovation in the GTalk network is limited. If both the clients and the server software were open source, this kind of innovation could happen. If Google didn’t want some of the new features in their official service, those who did could set up their own servers and use them there. And since it’s an open standard on an open network, they could still talk to all of their official-GTalk-using friends just like before. If that were to happen, then IM would be as open and democratic as email and the web.

There are lots of examples (besides IM) of tools and services online that fail to meet one or more of these three "tests of openness." The more we allow these closed and crippled technologies to become de facto standards on the Internet, the more we relinquish what should be a public commons to the control of a handful of owners. That’s what we’re really fighting against in the net neutrality struggle, so we should broaden the definition to include open standards and open software, not just open networks.