There are two distinct sets of problems relating to WAP: procedural, and technical. In this section we will describe the procedural problems. The procedural problems lie in the processes that the WAP Forum has used to develop and disseminate the WAP specifications.
A highly desirable attribute of an industry standard protocol is that it be the result of an open design process. What this means is that, somewhere along the line, the various constituencies that have a stake in the protocol be given a voice in its development.
This does not mean that the protocol must be conceived and built from the ground up by industry-wide consensus. Indeed, this is usually impractical, and of necessity, the first drafts of any protocol are usually created by a small group, functioning autonomously.
An open design process means only that at a certain point, ownership of the protocol must become public. Beyond that point, the various industry constituencies must be given an opportunity to participate in its design, and the design process must include mechanisms for reaching consensus among conflicting lobbies.
Openness of design has two important benefits. First, it allows the protocol to be subjected to adequate technical review, ensuring that it is a sound engineering solution. Second, it prevents the design of the protocol from being excessively influenced by minority business self-interests. An open design process provides vital assurance of the integrity of the resulting protocol, in both engineering and business terms.
The WAP specification is in complete violation of these principles. The specification has been developed exclusively by the WAP Forum, entirely behind closed doors, and without the benefit of a single public mailing list for discussion and review. The WAP Forum permits no outside influence over the specification; the only institutions that my participate in its development and maintenance are the WAP Forum members themselves.
The WAP Forum claims that the specification is open, on the grounds that any company or organization is free to join the forum. While technically this is true, membership in the Forum carries a $27,000 entrance fee (as of February 2000). In practice, this fee effectively excludes most small businesses, and virtually all academic institutions.
The WAP Forum is therefore a highly restricted subset of the business and academic community, and influence over the specification is limited to those companies that can afford this entrance fee. The specification is thus the creation of a limited constituency of the telecommunications world; specifically, it is primarily the creation of a set of telephone manufacturers. Though important, the telephone manufacturers represent just a single component of the world of data communications. In creating WAP, grossly inadequate consideration has been given to other important disciplines and constituencies, such as the Internet engineering community, the academic community, and the small business community.
An essential attribute of an industry standard protocol is that it be freely and permanently accessible to anyone who wishes to use it. In the Internet world, this is traditionally accomplished by means of RFC publication. RFC publication provides the following important benefits:
The WAP specifications do not carry these same assurances of free and permanent availability. Rather than being published as an RFC or by another third-party agency, the specifications are self-published by the WAP Forum. As a result of this, each of the above benefits of RFC publication is in some way diminished:
This last item is particularly worrisome. A key attribute of a protocol is that any particular revision of it be fixed - indeed, this is the very definition of a standard. The WAP Forum's disclaimer gives it the power to modify individual revisions of the specification at will - an extraordinary power to hold over something that purports to be an industry standard. This is not a purely theoretical concern - the WAP Forum has already exercised this power inappropriately [14].
Of overriding significance is the fact that the WAP Forum has declined to publish its specifications as RFCs. For all the above reasons, Internet-related protocols are always published as RFCs - this is the mainstream, industry-standard, method for publication of Internet protocols. RFC publication is well-understood and accepted within the Internet community, and fully represents the spirit of cooperation which is characteristic of this community. Quite simply, there is no good reason to do otherwise.
Yet the WAP Forum has done otherwise. Our question is: Why? We can think of only three plausible reasons:
Whatever the reason, the WAP Forum evidently does not subscribe to the spirit of openness and cooperation represented by RFC publication and practiced by the Internet engineering community at large.
An essential attribute of an industry building protocol is that there must be no restrictions on its usage. In particular, there must be no patent restrictions on the use of the protocol.
The WAP specification, however, is burdened with several patent restrictions. These include patents held by certain members of the WAP Forum itself, most notably Phone.com and Geoworks. Patent infringement claims have already been made by the holders of the following patents:
More patent infringement claims can almost certainly be expected in the future.
One of the benefits of a standard protocol is that it does not provide any advantage to one industry player over another. Anyone who wishes to develop products and/or services based on the protocol may do so, and may then compete with similar products and/or services in a fair, open, free-market environment. In such an environment products succeed or fail based on their merits, and the benefits to the consumer are those traditionally resulting from free-market competition: better products at lower prices.
The inclusion of patents in a standard entirely corrupts this process. The patent provides the patent-holder with a sustained and unfair market advantage. The losers are the industry as a whole, small companies, and the consumer.
Patents thus pose a significant danger to protocols. For this reason, the protocol development process must include mechanisms to address and eliminate patent restrictions. Such mechanisms exist, and are well-known and understood within the Internet community. For example, we refer the reader to RFC 2026, The Internet Standards Process - Revision 3 [4]. Section 10 of this document, Intellectual Property Rights, describes the policies and procedures followed by the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) in this regard. Among other things, this section describes their policy regarding:
The IESG policy is an example of the effort typically made within the Internet community to work strenuously and diligently towards the goal of a patent-free protocol.
As another example, the Free Protocols Foundation publishes a set of policies and procedures for protocol development that ensures, as far as possible, that the resulting protocol is functionally patent-free. These procedures are fully documented in the Free Protocols Foundation Policies and Procedures, Version 1.0 [11]. Any development organization is free to adopt these procedures with regard to its own protocols.
The WAP Forum, clearly, has not followed the example set by the Internet community at large. Procedures such as those of the IESG and the Free Protocols Foundation are well understood within the Internet community, and by following such procedures the WAP Forum could have ensured patent-freedom of the WAP specification, had it wished to do so. However, it has not adopted such procedures, and as a result the WAP specification is in total violation of the principles of patent-freedom.
More than any other factor, it is the failure of the WAP Forum to work towards a patent-free specification that leads us to characterize the WAP specification as a trap. Two of the companies that participated in the development of the WAP protocol (Phone.com and Geoworks) own patents which they silently included in the protocol design. They remained silent until use of the protocol began to spread throughout the industry, and only then did they announce their patent ownership and demand royalties. In effect, these companies have booby-trapped the WAP specification with their patents.
The WAP Forum clearly does not share the Internet community's commitment to patent freedom. Indeed, the WAP Forum's attitude to patents appears to be diametrically opposed to this. To quote Ben Linder, VP of Marketing for Phone.com [7],
``By virtue of building a standard, each company contributes a small part of it. Then you trade with each other to keep implementing the standard.''
Mr. Linder seems to view patent rights as something to be traded among companies like baseball cards. Our question is: How are companies without any cards expected to participate in this trade?
The spirit of a healthy protocol is that it be open and free, a spirit which the WAP specification violates completely. The WAP Forum's characterization of WAP as an ``open, license-free standard'' is utterly preposterous.
Throughout its web site and printed materials, the WAP Forum repeatedly refers to its specification as a ``standard.'' The use of this term is inappropriate and misleading.
In common engineering usage, the term ``standard'' means certain specific things. It means a protocol or other specification which
(a) is supported and approved by an established, professional standards organization, and
(b) has achieved industry-wide acceptance and usage.
The WAP specification enjoys neither form of legitimacy. It is approved by no organization other than the WAP Forum itself, which has no standing as a professional standards body. Also, despite the claims made in the WAP Forum's promotional material, it has achieved little acceptance in the marketplace. Though marketing projections for use of WAP are very impressive, its actual usage in the U.S. remains limited.
The WAP Forum's use of the word ``standard'' implies that their specification carries some kind of formal authority; in fact, it has none. The WAP Forum's use of this term is marketing hype, not an objective statement of fact.
Any group of business interests can form a members-only club, generate a specification, publish it themselves, and call it whatever they wish. Regardless of the name they choose to attach to it, however, this does not make the result a ``standard'' in the conventional sense.