Comments about Fee-based Standards for the Web

Dear W3C officials,

Just after reading some news about your project of making patents on your 
work and on standards, I decided to write some of my feelings about that issue. 
Note that I am writing as an individual who would like to preserve its freedom 
while going on the web.

I am really surprised about your new ideas about guarantees in interoperability 
to give people the freedom to choose its tools to surf the web. I thought it was 
the basic principle of a consortium such as w3c where companies could not get 
too much power over other and where they are represented by one person to 
prevent them from doing what they'd like to.

With your latest propositions, it seems that the big companies lobbying had 
done a wonderful work. So let me imagine what the future could be if these 
propositions will be followed by you guys. Imagine I am a big company 
distributing my software in almost 80% of the desktops web browsers and I'd 
like to propose a new medium format. So I'll make a proposition to you guys, 
which you'll accept and on which I will require a "RAND" as you name it, i.e. 
oblige people to give me money for making softwares able to use my new 
medium (let's say $10K). Since I own 80% of the web-browser market, 80% of 
the web-browser will be able to use my new medium format. Webmasters all 
around the world will use this new medium format on their own site because 
almost all web-browsers are "mine".So I forbid access to information to 20% of 
the web-browser and so, 20% of people. Is it what you call non-discriminatory?

So please, don't give to companies the power to own the Internet medium!
Please let people choose what software they'd like to use! And please let 
everybody who'd like it, access to your RFCs like it has always been the 
case.

Hoping that I had misunderstood what you'd like to do, 
Regards,

Nicolas Fugier

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 18:29:01 UTC