I learned the Dutch word vigerend (in force; conforming to the prevailing rules and norms) from an experienced banker I sat on a small board with. He used it in the notes to our annual accounts. It is the embarrassed diagnosis of comply or explain: “We comply with the norms and standards vigerend for an organisation of our size in this field.” Which roughly translates as: don’t bother us with your nonsense. Wisdom often lies in the choice of words, more than in the content of the message.
This is the third part of a triptych on standardisation. The first two parts appeared on LinkedIn and were barely read. That suits the town square: short attention, no long tail. From now on, a teaser there and the full read here.
Part 1: the engine
Standardisation is an agreement about meaning. Two early humans agreeing that the same sound refers to the same class of objects. That is language, and later writing. In Ur, še was the barley grain; 180 grains made a shekel. The word standard probably comes from standhard, “stand firm”: the banner you plant. What stays upright is the yardstick. From the dictionary to the USB plug, it is the same gesture: fix it in place so others can build on it.
Part 2: the process
The committee doesn’t win, the market does. In the Eindhoven of my youth, Philips’ Video 2000 was technically superior, and the porn was on VHS. I watched it happen from behind the rental counter. In Geneva, at the ITU, a North Korean delegate slept through the semantics of Message Sequence Charts and then said: “North Korea — no opinion.” HAVi over FireWire became redundant the moment a Smart TV could talk to a NAS. RFCs won because they were an invitation, not a plenary session.
Imposed standards die young. Commodus renamed the months after himself; as soon as he was dead, people went back to the old count. The French Republican calendar was more destructive, and died just as quickly.
Part 3: the bill
The cost rarely sits in the standard itself. It sits in the chain around it.
At Vakantieveilingen, a Dutch holiday auction site, I lost tens of percent of my team to DPIAs, a central opt-out service (unsubscribing across 23 subsystems, plus registering and confirming all of it) and consortium-wide cookie consent within the holding: a media company with more than 100 websites, each with its own architecture. What did our customers get in return, apart from a higher cost price?
At the AFM, the Dutch financial markets regulator, we collected PDFs full of tick boxes under the Financial Supervision Act and called it supervision. Little was done with them, except chasing those who failed to submit. In ISO implementations, the focus was too much on process and too little on substance. At small agencies, a recharged FTE suddenly disappeared into mandatory reports that visibly changed nothing about the work, just to comply with the imposed standard.
I have always disliked box-ticking. The pattern is older than the cookie banner. I saw it before, as CTO of the once-notorious Ab.Fab. In 2002 we faced the Dutch internet provider XS4All in the very first spam case in the Netherlands. The headline read: King of Spam brought down by lawsuits. The intention of what followed was to curb e-mail abuse. The result was a single law in 2004: opt-in for marketing e-mail, and the first cookie rule. Eight years later, that became the cookie banner. The spam folder turned out to be the real solution. The rules stayed.
Spam, by the way, is the word Monty Python gave us: a menu where every dish comes with spam, whether you ordered it or not. Compliance works the same way.
Five that were worth it
- The barley grain. Še, 180 to the shekel. A thing you can count.
- Positional notation with zero. Without that agreement, bookkeeping means tally marks and an abacus. Rome managed, but calculating on paper only really began with zero.
- The metre, and the SI. One length. Not because the ell was bad, but because 250,000 different measures make trade impossible.
- TCP/IP. The thin protocol beat the seven layers.
- UTF-8. One encoding. The reason a Sumerian name and this sentence can live in the same file.
Five that were not
- The French Republican calendar. Ten days to a week. Dead the moment Sunday came back.
- Decimal time. Logical, and gone within a few years.
- Video 2000. Better, and lost.
- OSI as mandatory implementation. A beautiful model. The internet ran on four layers.
- The certificate without measurement. The standard of which nobody can say anymore which problem it still solves.
A standard is valuable if you can build on it without calling the committee. If all you can do is cite it, it is merely vigerend.
What comes next: Age of Regulation
The same three layers. Legislation and market regulation are also an engine of prosperity and growth. Without rules, no market you can trust. The process is often horse-trading, driven by electoral games and political theatre: fighting fires with the reflex of adding another rule to the pile. The outcome is skimming, sand in the machine, a process that has overshot its purpose. Until a revolution occurs, as now seems to be unfolding in the world. Out with the king, in with the committee. History repeats itself, again and again.
More on that in the coming weeks. Shorter on the square. Longer here.
This is part 3 of a triptych on standardisation. More patterns from the history of data: History of Data.