Open Standards and the Digital Age

Russell traces the history of technical standards from the telegraph era through the internet, showing that "openness" has never been a stable or self-evident concept. What counted as open in AT&T's world was closed in the IETF's, and what the W3C calls open today would puzzle engineers from the 1960s. The book reconstructs the institutional battles — IEEE, ISO, IETF, corporate consortia — that gave the word its shifting political charge. Russell demonstrates that standards are not neutral technical artifacts but sites of power where market structure, ideology, and engineering culture collide. For anyone building products on top of open protocols or open-source ecosystems, this book supplies the history behind the language you already use. It is the best single volume on why "open" means something different to everyone who invokes it.