Interoperable Systems and the Government

Why are Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf considered the “inventors of the Internet”? Long, long ago, as computer networks started to get created, they were initially limited to universities and military installations in the US, writes Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine. Further, two different networks could not communicate with each other. Why not? Because they worked on different hardware, had computers that ran different OS’s, application software was written in different programming languages, and most importantly the protocol used for communication within a network was not standardized – each network followed its own method to communicate, so no two networks could communicate with each other.

 

In such a setup, vendors had no incentive to make things compatible with each other. In fact, corporations (who were major customers) considered the lack of compatibility a feature, not a bug! Why? Because they feared security leaks and industrial espionage. Thus, if a rival corporate network could not interoperate with one’s own network, then it eliminated the risk of hacking.

 

Back to the question at the top of the blog - Why are Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf considered the “inventors of the Internet”? Because they published a paper in 1974 for inter-network communication. The protocol was called TCP/IP. Not just the idea, they went on to create a working implementation of the concept. Convincing others to use TCP/IP was very painful, as expected. Each time they brought in a new participant, the conversation had to begin all over again. It was slow and contentious.

 

The key to the eventual pivot to TCP/IP as the protocol that made interoperability possible was the fact that the biggest networking customer then was the US military. Kahn, who was in a top position at one those US military agencies, decided to make TCP/IP the default across all those networks. It would still take more than a decade to roll out, but the first major step to standardize things had been taken. By the time the Internet, as we know it today, began to evolve, TCP/IP had the advantage of already being in use, and equally important, a tried and tested protocol. So it became the de facto protocol of the Net.

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This sequence probably helps explain why interoperable systems have stopped coming from the West and come from developing countries, like UPI in India. Western systems today are created by private companies that, while innovative, won’t cooperate. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple – all highly innovative, but definitely companies that ensure their data and protocols are private, not shared, and definitely not interoperable.

 

Whereas India could frame UPI because the government can, if it chooses, come up with and “force” solutions for the greater good. Private companies can barely look beyond their quarterly results. The US government, as we saw, could do it with TCP/IP decades back; today, they would face a huge backlash against communist-style-top-down-control if they tried any such measure.

 

I think India should take a long and hard look at such events from American history and learn. Is it really inevitable that governments can create interoperable systems only upto a point, beyond which private systems will take over and even make it hard for good government designed systems to take root? Or can a government take active measures to ensure that they can design systems for the greater good even after a country becomes rich? Is it a mistake to be married to an ideology (like America with its “governments should not be trusted” idea)? Is it better to be open to hybrid approaches like China? Are solutions culture dependent, what works in the West isn’t necessarily the right fit for an Asian society? And most importantly, perhaps India should not be pig headed like the Americans and dismiss any ideas being tried in countries they don’t like? Perhaps we should watch and learn from China, despite all the hostility, both from China’s successes and its mistakes?