The Internet is for End Users

Got to reading this document from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and it’s a good one.

The intro is stellar:

Many who participate in the IETF are most comfortable making what we believe to be purely technical decisions; our process favors technical merit through our well-known mantra of "rough consensus and running code."

Nevertheless, the running code that results from our process (when things work well) inevitably has an impact beyond technical considerations, because the underlying decisions afford some uses while discouraging others. While we believe we are making only technical decisions, in reality, we are defining (in some degree) what is possible on the Internet itself.

This impact has become significant. As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments, revolutionize social orders, swing elections, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying that of others.

All of this raises the question: For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code?

That’s some great self-awareness there.

Merely advancing the measurable success of [a thing] is not an adequate goal; doing so ignores how technology is so often used as a lever to assert power over users, rather than empower them.

Succinct.

the Internet will succeed or fail based upon the actions of its end users, because they are the driving force behind its growth to date. Not prioritizing them jeopardizes the network effect that the Internet relies upon to provide so much value.

A good argument for browser diversity, I think:

User agents act as intermediaries between a service and the end user; rather than downloading an executable program from a service that has arbitrary access into the users' system, the user agent only allows limited access to display content and run code in a sandboxed environment. End users are diverse and the ability of a few user agents to represent individual interests properly is imperfect, but this arrangement is an improvement over the alternative -- the need to trust a website completely with all information on your system to browse it.

Take away:

We should pay particular attention to the kinds of architectures we create and whether they encourage or discourage an Internet that works for end users.