Terry In 1992, MIT computer scientist David Clark said, “We reject kings, presidents and votes. We believe in broad consensus and running code.” It was an ode to the first generation of Internet administrators.
This voice came at a time when most people could barely imagine how the Internet would become a new medium of human communication and surpass the impact on society and everyday life of all the media that had come before it.
David Klar’s rhetoric embodies a very different approach to the leadership and governance of global resources, and introduces a very effective ecosystem of governance mechanisms.
State-based institutions have been managing globally important resources since the end of World War II. Two of the most powerful of these institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, were born at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
The United Nations and UN-affiliated institutions like the World Health Organization have always had a monopoly on global problem-solving. These institutions were themselves hierarchical by design, as hierarchy was the most influential paradigm in the first half of that war-torn century.
But these industrial-scale solutions are decidedly inappropriate for the challenges faced in the digital age. The rise of the Internet was a major sign that the traditional culture of governance was beginning to outgrow the times.
In 1992, the majority of traffic on the Internet occurred in the form of email. The graphical browser that allowed Tim Berners-Lee’s to implement his extraordinary World Wide Web was still two years away.
Most people were not connected and did not understand the technologies. Many of the institutions that could have gradually taken charge of this important global resource were either in their infancy or had not yet emerged.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international community that oversees many aspects of Internet governance, had only been in existence for four years by then.
The body that could provide such critical services as domain name management, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), was still six years short of being established at that point. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn were just then beginning to recruit people to build what would become the Internet Society.
The evolution of the second generation of the Internet also reflects a passion for openness and an aversion to hierarchical systems, as reflected in the thinking of Satoshi Nakamoto, Voris, Andreas Antonopoulos, Saub and Roger Ver, among others.
Open source is an important organizing principle, but it is not a practice that has led to progress. While the open source approach has transformed many organizations in society, we still need coordination, organization, and leadership.
Open source projects like Wikipedia and Linux have the principle of wise rule, but there are still “benign dictators” such as Jimmy Wales and Linus Torvalds.
To his credit, Satoshi Nakamoto incorporated distributed power, networked integrity, uncontested values, stakeholder rights (including privacy, security, and ownership), and inclusiveness into the design of the technology through code.
As a result, the technology was able to thrive in its early days, gradually blossoming into the ecosystem we know today. However, this atheistic policy of non-interference began to show its limits. As with all disruptive technologies, there are competing views in the blockchain ecosystem. Even the core blockchain delegation has split into different crypto camps, with each organization advocating its own agenda.
If you follow the block size debate, is it really about block size?” said Brian Ford, a former White House employee and blockchain advocate who is now the director of MIT’s digital currency initiative. It really is in the media, but what I see is also a debate on governance mechanisms.”
What kind of model or what kind of leadership system does this ecosystem need? Mike Hearn is a key developer of a bitcoin core. His farewell letter in January 2015 predicting the “imminent death of Bitcoin” caused a stir in the industry.
In the letter, he listed the pressing challenges facing the industry; notably that important technical standards questions remain unanswered, and that there is discord and confusion within the ranks of the community.
Mike Hearn concludes that these challenges will eventually lead Bitcoin to failure. We disagree with this. Mike Hearn identifies these issues as Bitcoin’s fatal flaw, but this article seems to us to be a paper on governance mechanisms among multiple stakeholders based on transparency, contribution, and collaboration, and its implications are profound.
The code is just a tool. If this technology needs to move to the next level and realize its long-term promise, humans need to lead. We now need all stakeholders in the network to come together and focus on some key issues.
We have listed some of the obstacles that lie ahead, and they are significant. However, this is a challenge to the success of this change, not a reason to oppose it.
To this day, many of the issues remain unresolved and some collective action to address them is lacking. How should this technology continue to scale, and do so without causing harm to the real world? Will those powerful forces stifle innovation or take it into their pockets? How will we address some of the controversial standards-related issues without regressing to a cascading mechanism?
That’s what we’ve been working on for the past two years. We have found that we need the collaboration of non-state controlled social groups, private industry, government, individual stakeholders, and we can’t rely on state-based institutions. We call these “Global Solutions Networks” (GSNs). These networks are growing, enabling new kinds of companies, social change, and even the production of global public value.
One important network is, naturally, the Internet itself. Its aggregation, orchestration, and governance are made possible by collaborative relationships consisting of individuals, social group organizations, and corporations, and also by implicit (and sometimes active) support from the state, where such collaboration was once unthinkable.
However, no government, state, corporation, or state-oriented institution can control the Internet. It works. By doing so, it has demonstrated that diverse stakeholders can manage a global resource through inclusiveness, consensus and transparency.
The lessons are clear. Good governance of such complex global innovations cannot be left to governments alone; nor can we leave this task to the private sector; after all, commercial interests are not enough to ensure that this technology will serve society.
Ultimately, we need global stakeholders to work together and provide leadership.
