The sinking of the great ship Titanic is probably the most famous disaster in history, and has become an everyday term to describe disasters or all types. Although there is still much controversy surrounding the event, one thing is for sure: if the Titanic struck an iceberg today, certainly there would not be as many victims.
[AO: You don't actually say what happened. The novel says more about the details than this article. This article should say a bit more about it.]
The first reason is that, after the incident, a series of rules were adopted and standards introduced to prevent new accidents.
Telecommunications were improved and standardized. There are now specific radio channels to call for help.
In almost everything that we do today, standards are decisive, especially in communications. We could present thousands of examples. For instance, to place a phone call to Brazil from a location outside that country, you must first dial 55. This is number assigned by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which defines the standards for making phone calls. Without this rule, even making a phone call would be chaotic and perhaps impossible.
What would happen if the Web didn't have standards?
Communication would probably be very difficult. We need HTTP (the protocol whose name you see at the beginning of web URLs) so the server and browser can exchange a page, and HTML so the browser can figure out how to display the page. In addition, there are a couple software slot (a ports) dedicated to the Web on all computers that support it. If each web server just chose the port we thought best, Web surfers would have a hard time finding pages.
What would happen if the Internet didn't have the TCP/IP communication protocol? There would be no rules to allow different networks to talk to each other. Standardization ensures network interoperability and communicability.
We could even say that language itself is a type of standard that allows us to interact socially and classify the world.
Standards can be open or proprietary. They are open when they are developed collectively, through cooperation, without being controlled by a single group or company. They are proprietary when they are under the control of an owner. Some proprietary products become de facto standards, when a product is so popular that it begins to make the rules for the entire market.
Proprietary standards may seem just as good as open ones so long as they meet customer needs, but they always contain the germ of risk. For instance, one large hospital stored medical records for its patients on a proprietary format developed by a single company. Ten years later, the doctors need to analyze the records for patients, but their new software could no longer open the old format. This happened because the company that created the software had no reason to promote interoperability. It was much more interested in the profitability derived from hemming in its users.
If we use open formats defined collectively, like the standards developed for the Internet, we could be sure that these records could be opened regardless of the software that they use (see ODF).
The Internet has open standards, developed by groups of volunteers. That is why no one says the Internet has an owner. It is free and continues to be developed through cooperation between individuals, companies, NGOs, and even government representatives. A few of these participants include the IAB, IETF, IESG, and W3C. These organizations discuss the technical aspects of proposed standardization and, when they arrive at a consensus, release an RFC (Request for Comments).
Despite the name, which suggests that the standard is only being put up for discussion, an Internet RFC describes a standard that can be applied by everyone. (However, the standard can be changed over time, so an RFC can replace an earlier one.)
A repository of all Internet RFCs can be found at in IETF website.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops HTTP, HTML, and several other key standards that make the Web possible, struggled with the need for open standards at one point. They came close to declaring that standards could contain proprietary technology that required licensing fees, because some attractive technologies were offered to it by companies on that basis. But the Internet community mustered intense pressure to keep the Web open. The W3C started to respond, declaring that the licensing fees had to be “reasonable.” Finally they were won over completely to the open position and declared that their standards would be completely free of licenses.
Nevertheless, many popular formats in widespread used on the Internet—even the MP3 format—are proprietary and unavailable on some systems. Until totally open, free formats replace them, some people will have trouble communicating, just like the crew on the Titanic.