Social Protocols - slide "Social Protocols and Policy"

social protocols should enable end-user configuration and preference expression
enable the emergence of self forming content, trust, and economic communities
government may wish to extend their own concepts of community on to the Net
two models of technology policy
1. specifying an instance - everyone fights over what X is.
2. configuring an option - the platform supports W, X, Y, and Z.
W3C chose strategy #2 and also promoted "good" engineering principles to the user interface level: abstraction, modularity, and extensibility.