Protocol: The customs and regulations dealing with diplomatic formality, precedence, and etiquette.

“Protocols are highly formal; that is, they encapsulate information inside technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information contained within. Viewed as a whole, protocol is a distributed management system that allows control to exist within a heterogeneous material milieu”

(Alexander Galloway, Protocol, MIT, 2004)

“The push to standardize presumes the ability to constrain a phenonemon within a particular set of dimensions that stipulate its outcome. A great deal of work is conducted to make the standard possible, and then this must be followed up by agents committed to implementation and oversight. Again, standardization is a recursive practice, necessarily historical and embedded in a series of complex events and social structures”

(Martha Lampland, Susan Leigh Star: Standards and their stories, Cornell, 2009)

“In outline, the process of creating an Internet Standard is straightforward (…) In practice, the process is more complicated, due to (1) the difficulty of creating specifications of high technical quality; (2) the need to consider the interests of all of the affected parties; (3) the importance of establishing widespread community consensus; and (4) the difficulty of evaluating the utility of a particular specification for the Internet community.”

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026

«I expected all kinds of data formats to exist on the Web. I also felt there had to be one common lingua franca that any computer would be required to understand. (…) The art was to define the few basic, common rules of “protocol” that would allow one computer talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down.»

(Tim Berners Lee, Weaving the web, 1999)

«Control is not exerted externally by force, but instead exploits the already emergent behaviour in the system. The self-organization of individual agents in the network seems to give the freedom to act, but in reality local exceptional rules are present that compromise their actions. (…) How to rupture the relations between acting and being acted upon, or between programming and being programmed?»

(Geoff Cox, Speaking Code, MIT 2012)