Orwell and Internet Standards
In 1946 George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Blair, published Politics and the English Language, which described the corruption of our language as it “modernizes.” Orwell pushed us as a society to return the better days of simpler language as we used complex and fancy words, and important terminology from foreign languages. However, not all language was degrading. Some remain quality, or perhaps even went the other way, and one example are the Requests for Comments published by the IETF.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an organization that manages and maintains internet standards. These standards dictate how the machines that we use communicate and become the internet. The Request for Comment (RFC) series are publications which hold technical or organizational notes and proposals for future standards. The first was published in 1969 by Steve Crocker and mailed to several colleagues working on ARPANET across the United States. Now, there are over eight thousand RFCs, published by a diverse group of authors. RFCs are published publicly on the RFC Editor and IETF websites, and once assigned a number and published are permanent. This allows anyone to view almost fifty years of documentation on the development of the networked systems all the way from ARPANET to the modern Internet. In addition to all RFCs being publically accessible, any person can submit one if it is approved by the RFC Editor organization. This has allowed an open culture to form around the series, which has produced a great effect upon the development of the internet.
The original group of RFC authors was quite small, only around ten, but now any person involved can write one. As both a cause and product of this feature, RFCs are written in such a way that as long as the reader has the necessary basic understanding of computer networking they will be able to understand the RFCs with minimal research, or nowadays Google-foo. Rather than creating and using complicated technical terms for each subject, the RFCs tend to go with descriptive combinations of commonplace words or basic terminology: “private-use addresses” or “nameservers.” Private-use addresses are exactly what they sound like, addresses to servers/computers that are only for the owner. Nameservers is slightly more complicated, due to its compound word nature, but is still simple because they are just servers that respond with the IP of a website based on its name. Naturally, this practice has only increased over time, due to the evolving needs for terminology as more different features are invented. To illustrate, the earlier RFCs appear more terminology dense because they are dealing with atomic terms: bits, hosts, links, packets, checksum, remote, teletype, echo, and more. The majority of terms used in later RFCs are either known to the general public or compound terms: firewall, site administrator, reverse-mapping queries, or address blocks. The choice of the terms, while very possibly at this point no longer conscious, is very critical to the readability of these documents for people how have not done extensive research into the subject of the RFC.
However, the choice of language that affects the readability of the RFCs is not just limited to the terminology, but the words chosen as well. For example, in RFC: 1, words such as “congestion”, “simultaneously”, and “primitive” are used. While not particularly unique words, they are not at all characteristic of the more recent RFCs, whose most unusual words are more or less limited to “authoritative”, “unexpected”, and “significance.” Although it is true that there are other, more common words that could have been used, they do not have much of a negative effect on how much it allows someone to read it.
While the choice of words and terminology was likely not conscious, it did bring a great effect to the community oriented nature of both the development of the internet, as well as the use of the internet itself. As more people got involved, the word choice became simpler, which allowed more people to contribute, opening the development from the engineers who worked on ARPANET to the public. The documents in the series progressed opposite the way Orwell said that language in general was moving, and this proved to be a great benefit for humanity’s greatest creation.
