Converging Standards

Our six converging industries all have separate standards committees working on
hardware and software standardization and content standardization (including, for
example, authentication and encryption standards).
The Internet potentially provides a uniform set of protocols that can be used to
move content around and make money from it. The Internet standards-making community
(the IETF) certainly has an interest in this process. The Web provides the mechanism
for storing and retrieving content (and in the process making money from it), so
the WWW standards-making community (W3C) certainly has an interest as well. Ideally,
all of these industries and their respective standards-making institutions would
get together to standardize content management.
Arguably, the IETF is in the best position to do this, since the Internet is the point of
intersection between all content generators. All six industries therefore have an interest
in the offered traffic mix, offered traffic distribution, offered traffic properties, and
offered traffic value. We have also determined that offered traffic value is dependent
on the preservation of offered traffic quality (that is, the preservation of the properties
of the offered traffic).