IEEE Spectrum August, 2013 - 43

ing point. At a 1989 meeting in Europe, the
OSI advocate Brian Carpenter gave a talk ti-
tled "Is OSI Too Late?" It was, he recalled in
a recent memoir, "the only time in my life"
that he "got a standing ovation in a techni-
cal conference." Two years later, the French
networking expert and former INWG mem-
ber Pouzin, in an essay titled "Ten Years of
OSI-Maturity or Infancy?," summed up the
growing uncertainty: "Government and cor-
porate policies never fail to recommend OSI
as the solution. But, it is easier and quicker to
implement homogenous networks based on
proprietary architectures, or else to intercon-
nect heterogeneous systems with TCP-based
products." Even for OSI's champions, the
Internet was looking increasingly attractive.
That sense of doom deepened, progress
stalled, and in the mid-1990s, OSI's beauti-
ful dream finally ended. The effort's fatal
flaw, ironically, grew from its commitment
to openness. The formal rules for interna-
tional standardization gave any interested
party the right to participate in the design
process, thereby inviting structural tensions,
incompatible visions, and disruptive tactics.
OSI's first chairman, Bachman, had an-
ticipated such problems from the start. In
a conference talk in 1978, he worried about
OSI's chances of success: "The organization-
al problem alone is incredible. The technical
problem is bigger than any one previously
faced in information systems. And the po-
litical problems will challenge the most as-
tute statesmen. Can you imagine trying to
get the representatives from ten major and
competing computer corporations, and ten
telephone companies and PTTs [state-owned
telecom monopolies], and the technical ex-
perts from ten different nations to come to
any agreement within the foreseeable future?"
Despite Bachman's and others' best ef-
forts, the burden of organizational overhead
never lifted. Hundreds of engineers attended
the meetings of OSI's various committees
and working groups, and the bureaucratic
procedures used to structure the discussions
didn't allow for the speedy production of
standards. Everything was up for debate-
even trivial nuances of language, like the
difference between "you will comply" and
"you should comply," triggered complaints.
More significant rifts continued between
OSI's computer and telecom experts, whose
technical and business plans remained at

odds. And so openness and modularity-the
key principles for coordinating the project-
ended up killing OSI.

ment subsidies for their research eventually
created a distinct commercial advantage:
Internet protocols could be implemented
for free. (To use OSI standards, companies
that made and sold networking equipment
had to purchase paper copies from the stan-
dards group ISO, one copy at a time.) Marc
Levilion, an engineer for IBM France, told
me in a 2012 interview about the computer
industry's shift away from OSI and toward
TCP/IP: "On one side you have something
that's free, available, you just have to load it.
And on the other side, you have something
which is much more architectured, much
more complete, much more elaborate, but
it is expensive. If you are a director of com-
putation in a company, what do you choose?"
By the mid-1990s, the Internet had become
the de facto standard for global computer
networking. Cruelly for OSI's creators, In-
ternet advocates seized the mantle of "open-
ness" and claimed it as their own. Today, they
routinely campaign to preserve the "open
Internet" from authoritarian governments,
regulators, and would-be monopolists.

Meanwhile, the Internet flourished. With
ample funding from the U.S. government,
Cerf, Kahn, and their colleagues were shield-
ed from the forces of international politics
and economics. ARPA and the Defense Com-
munications Agency accelerated the Inter-
net's adoption in the early 1980s, when they
subsidized researchers to implement Inter-
net protocols in popular operating systems,
such as the modification of Unix by the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. Then, on
1 January 1983, ARPA stopped supporting
the ARPANET host protocol, thus forcing its
contractors to adopt TCP/IP if they wanted
to stay connected; that date became known
as the "birth of the Internet."
And so, while many users still expected
OSI to become the future solution to global
network interconnection, growing numbers
began using TCP/IP to meet the practical
near-term pressures for interoperability.
Engineers who joined the Internet com-
In light of the success of the nimble Internet,
munity in the 1980s frequently misconstrued
OSI, lampooning it as a misguided monstros- OSI is often portrayed as a cautionary tale of
ity created by clueless European bureaucrats. overbureaucratized "anticipatory standard-
Internet engineer Marshall Rose wrote in
ization" in an immature and volatile market.
his 1990 textbook that the "Internet com- This emphasis on its failings, however, misses
munity tries its very best to ignore the OSI OSI's many successes: It focused attention on
cutting-edge technological questions, and
community. By and large, OSI technology is
ugly in comparison to Internet technology." it became a source of learning by doing-
including some hard knocks-for a genera-
Unfortunately, the Internet community's
bias also led it to reject any technical insights
tion of network engineers, who went on to
from OSI. The classic example was the "pal- create new companies, advise governments,
and teach in universities around the world.
ace revolt" of 1992. Though not nearly as
Beyond these simplistic declarations of
formal as the bureaucracy that devised OSI,
the Internet had its Internet Activities Board "success" and "failure," OSI's history holds
and the Internet Engineering Task Force, important lessons that engineers, policymak-
responsible for shepherding the develop- ers, and Internet users should get to know
better. Perhaps the most important lesson
ment of its standards. Such work went on
at a July 1992 meeting in Cambridge, Mass. is that "openness" is full of contradictions.
OSI brought to light the deep incompatibility
Several leaders, pressed to revise routing
between idealistic visions of openness and
and addressing limitations that had not
the political and economic realities of the
been anticipated when TCP and IP were
designed, recommended that the commu- international networking industry. And OSI
eventually collapsed because it could not rec-
nity consider-if not adopt-some technical
protocols developed within OSI. The hun- oncile the divergent desires of all the interest-
dreds of Internet engineers in attendance
ed parties. What then does this mean for the
howled in protest and then sacked their continued viability of the open Internet? n
leaders for their heresy.
Although Cerf and Kahn did not design
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum August, 2013