A few weeks ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released Realizing the Potential of Blockchain, a report by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, authors of Blockchain Revolution which was published in May, 2016, and founders of the recently launched Blockchain Research Institute. “The last few decades brought us the internet of information. We are now witnessing the rise of the internet of value,” wrote the authors in the report’s Executive Summary. “Like the first generation of the internet, this second generation promises to disrupt business models and transform industries… pulling us into a new era of openness, decentralization and global inclusion.”
“However, this extraordinary technology may be stalled, sidetracked, captured or otherwise suboptimized depending on how all the stakeholders behave in stewarding this set of resources - i.e. how it is governed,” they add in a strong note of caution. “How we govern the internet of information as a global resource serves as a model for how to govern this new resource: through a multi-stakeholder approach using what we call global governance networks.”
I totally agree.
The Internet and World Wide Web brought a badly needed culture of collaboration and standards to the IT industry. In the 1980s, it was quite difficult to get different IT systems to talk to each other. Just sending an e-mail across two different applications from two different vendors was quite a chore, as was sharing information across disparate systems. Then in the 1990s, the open Internet protocol, - TCP/IP, - was widely embraced by the general IT marketplace, making it possible to interconnect systems and applications from any vendors. Internet e-mail protocols, - SMTP, MIME, POP, IMAP, - enabled people to easily communicate with anyone on any system. At the same time, the Web’s open standards, - HTML, HTTP, URLs enabled any PC connected to the Internet to access information on any web server anywhere in the world.
A similar story played out with Unix. In the 1980s, Unix became a popular operating system for technical workstations, supercomputers and other kinds of systems. Every vendor had developed its own version of Unix, - IBM’s AIX, Sun’s Solaris, HP’s HP-UX, and several others, - and they were all somewhat different and incompatible, making it difficult to port applications across these different flavors of Unix. Attempts to unify UNIX were not successful. Finally, in the 1990s Linux emerged as a Unix-like operating system that over time was embraced by just about all vendors.