Backup Brain:

[Imagine] The W3C says that all patents by members relating to the web must be royalty free. The next day, Microsoft resigns its membership. The day after that, it announces that it’s no longer going to allow free access to its patent on CSS, and announces that Netscape and Opera need to either remove CSS support from their browsers or pay an exorbitant price per downloaded copy. What happens to the web then?

Balkanization, I guess. But — counterpoint: What happens when (say) Unisys pushes a cool new standard called XYZ as a W3C spec, under RAND, for the small sum of $1 per installation for each implementor, or for a sum of $100,000 for an unlimited number of installs? (sounds Reasonable And Non Discriminatory, right?) Problem: there is no way the Konquerer and Mozilla developers are can keep track of the use of their software, and anyway it is unreasonable to expect volunteer developers to pay to implement a standard. MSFT, Opera, et al, on the other hand, could probably work out a deal with Unisys wherein they pay per CD shipped or per download from their site. The end-result is large groups of content-creators and a smaller group of browser developers disenfranchised from the W3C system, which ’til today was accessible to Joe Developer and Big Megacorp alike. Now Joe Developer will not sit idle, he will fork the web to keep it free. So the end result is Balkanization again.

But between the two Balkans, I know which one I would rather have, and it is not the first. And — IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Philips and all the rest of ‘em so lovingly pushing RAND need a reality check here — the web is more valuable to you unbalkanized. Wake up and smell the coffee.