Re: From W3C's eCommerce Interest Group of the 1990s to Today's Web Payments Discussion

On Tue, 08 Apr 2014 18:55:25 +0200, Steven Rowat  
<steven_rowat@sunshine.net> wrote:

> On 4/7/14 5:11 PM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
>> RE: members of [any group] will not, unless forced, take kindly to
>> anything that obstructs their interests (as they define them)
>>
>> There's nothing unique in that way about large companies. The same can
>> be said for any organization, including a local farmer's market.
>
> What you say is true, because I didn't clearly state that my underlying  
> objection is specific to legally-mandated profit-seeking companies;

As Joseph pointed out already, the Web is a commons, and that means  
"everyone" gets to play in the development.

While I have no objection to the world being overtaken by something  
better, I'll fight hard against it being overtaken by something even worse  
than the terrible "system" we work in now.

> perhaps I believed that part understood. But anyway, your answer doesn't  
> seem to address that.

Well, no. Given that legal companies, crazy hippies, nasty moneygrubbers  
and all the rest of us are part of the environment, "addressing" that  
means either wiping us out, or building something that doesn't integrate  
with the real world. Both are legitimate goals for an individual: Neither  
are relevant to W3C, but nor, I fear, relevant to most people trying to  
build a standard for payments that will make a change on the Web.

...
> This was my concern with the W3C in my experience with the HTML5  
> development, which Charles McCathie Nevile has confirmed in a later post:
>
>> I also think the often intense politics that led to the HTML WG and  
>> which go back over a decade account for some of its atypical nature.
>
> Charles speaks positively about this being an anomaly for the W3C, and  
> that is comforting. Yet it might only be that HTML5 was the most  
> important single change available for corporations to influence since  
> the web's inception, and so they did.

No, the politics are far more obsure, and related in large part to a power  
struggle within the ostensibly uninteresting and certainly very very very  
small world of "who determines what HTML looks like".

> The fact that the change might have proceeded in a way that
> disenfranchised a large swath of people from direct creative and
> financial participation in the web is not the corporation's problem.

That is sound logic, but I don't think it proceeds from premises grounded  
in what had and has actually happened.

> Their solution was to regulate it in such a way that only themselves,  
> the experts, could have control.

That said, this has been a problem with HTML.

> I suggest this could happen again with web payments -- which may be even  
> more of an opportunity than HTML5 was, for many things.

Indeed. On the other hand, over a decade of pain I think W3C (which  
doesn't have much interest in selling out to the corporate giants, since  
it then effectively becomes irrelevant) has learned a lot about how to  
handle this issue better.

> Yet, other things will come down the pipe unexpectedly -- like the web  
> did.... The banks, Visa, Mastercard, Google, Apple -- all will do their  
> best to appropriate all the nuts and bolts work that is offered and turn  
> it into something that will benefit themselves.

Sure. We'd be stupid to be blind to this risk. We'd also be foolish (IMHO)  
to imagine that we can build as if there is no alternative but some  
glorious noble and pure system that we will come up with - in part because  
that puts *us* in the position of the expertise-guarding people whose  
methodology we purport to derive, with the only difference being that we  
have far less relevance to the real world.

cheers

chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2014 11:28:15 UTC