Joseph M. Reagle Jr.
Policy Analyst, World Wide Web Consortium
Research Engineer, Laboratory for Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On the foundations of basic network, meta-data, and negotiation protocols, a
"new" set of protocols, "social protocols," are being built. They are
in fact applications of meta-data and negotiation that mimic the social capabilities
people have in the real world: to create rich content, make verifiable assertions, create
agreements, and to develop and manage trust relationships. Furthermore, governments
realize that a significant portion of their constituencies and markets are moving online.
Consequently, as the sophistication of one's interactions on the Web increase, so does the
regulators' interest in extending their "real world" mandates on commerce and
culture to the Web.
Traditionally -- 3 years worth of history! -- governments attempted to regulate the Net by
controlling "choke points." This regulation associates liability with entities
that are easily targeted by law (ISPs, telcos, and large content producers) rather than
the mass of nearly anonymous individuals. We argue that in the future as social protocols
become common, governments could promulgate more effective controls by regulating
relationships. With the rise of extensible and user configurable technologies (based on
things such as the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the Resource Description Framework
(RDF), and digital signatures) relationships and behavior will be most effectively
controlled through the structure of the data and the user interface, not the network
infrastructure.
In this paper we will introduce the concept of meta-data (RDF), discuss policy based
design of meta-data schemas (found in P3P), discuss the impact of meta-data on technology
regulation, and examine the question as to whether the ability of social protocols to
create and maintain spontaneous and emergent online social structures will be co-opted by
their ability to propagate "real world" norms on the Web.