Governance
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Non State Organizations
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rough consensus and running code
Medium
6 min
Primary Source
Who Actually Decides How the Internet Works?
The rule that built the internet has no enforcement mechanism whatsoever
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Every time you load a webpage, your device follows rules it didn't agree to — rules no government wrote, no court enforces, and no company owns. So who made them? And why does anyone follow them?
Most power we recognize comes packaged with force. States have armies and courts. Firms have contracts and capital. But some of the most consequential rules in the world are made by organizations that have neither — no police, no shareholders, no territory. These are non-state organizations: NGOs, standards bodies, international institutions, unions. They shape what you eat, what your doctor prescribes, and how every packet of data that makes up the internet travels from one machine to another.
The internet's case is the strangest of all. The technical standards that define how computers talk to each other — what an email is, how a browser requests a page, what HTTPS means — were not handed down by any government. They were produced by a loose community of engineers following a principle so informal it sounds like a joke: rough consensus and running code.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was founded in 1986. It has no headquarters. Membership requires no application. Anyone can join a mailing list and start arguing. Decisions are not made by vote — votes, the IETF explicitly says, are how you count heads, not weigh arguments. Instead, a working group chair listens to the discussion and judges whether the objections that remain are "fundamental" or merely "loud."
The output of this process is called an RFC — a Request for Comments. RFCs are numbered sequentially. RFC 1, written in 1969 by Steve Crocker (b. 1944, United States) — one of the original ARPANET engineers — established the format itself. Today there are over 9,000 of them. Some are standards. Some are informational. Some are deliberately whimsical (RFC 2324 defines the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol). The ones that matter are the ones that run — the ones that actual software implements.
Make your call
A new proposal for how browsers should handle encrypted connections gets submitted to the IETF. One engineer raises a serious technical objection. Nobody else agrees the objection is fatal. What happens?
A
The proposal is blocked until the objecting engineer is satisfied
B
The chair calls a vote and the majority wins
C
The chair judges whether the objection reveals a real flaw — and may proceed without resolving it
Key Insight
RFC 7282 — "On Consensus and Humming in the IETF" — written by Pete Resnick (b. 1966, United States), published 2014. This is the document that formally defines how internet standards get made.
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"The IETF is committed to making its decisions by rough consensus. In the IETF, we don't vote. Humming is not voting. We hum to help the chairs understand the level of support or opposition. The goal of humming is to determine if there is rough consensus, not to count heads. Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated. Rough consensus is not the same as unanimity. There can be people who disagree with the outcome. The key is that their objections have been heard and considered. If someone's objection is simply that they don't like the direction — but they can't articulate a technical reason why — the chair can determine that their objection doesn't prevent rough consensus."
— RFC 7282, Pete Resnick, 2014 (IETF)
Look at the third sentence of that excerpt: "Humming is not voting." At IETF meetings, when a chair wants to gauge support, they ask people to hum — literally, audibly hum. Louder hum means more support. But the chair is explicitly not counting the hum. They're listening for whether opposition is substantive.
This sounds like it would collapse into chaos or capture by whoever shouts loudest. The reason it doesn't is the second half of the principle: running code. A standard only becomes real when software implements it. You can argue forever on a mailing list, but if your proposal can't be implemented and deployed — if it doesn't actually work when engineers try to build it — it dies regardless of how many people hummed in its favor. The code is the check on the consensus. This is why the internet's governance has produced remarkably durable technical standards: the ones that survive are the ones that work.
This matters beyond the internet. The IETF model is a proof of concept that legitimate, durable rules can emerge from open argument and demonstrated practice — without a state, without enforcement, without anyone being in charge. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) uses a similar model for web standards. So does the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for domain names, though with more friction and controversy.
None of these bodies can make you comply. But if you want your software to talk to the rest of the internet, you follow the RFCs. That's the hidden enforcement mechanism: not coercion, but interoperability. Defect from the standard and your product stops working with everyone else's. The internet's rules hold because the alternative — building something that can't connect — is worse than following rules you didn't vote for.
Which is, when you think about it, how most rules actually work.
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Sources
Images from Wikimedia Commons. Attribution required by license.
As of 2024, this office building at 12025 Waterfront Drive in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, California was the headquarters building of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Photographed by user Coolcaesar on June 26, 2024.
Coolcaesar · CC BY 4.0
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