Open standard

And I guess, you know, ISOC directly doesn't engage on this, but where this is happening, of course, a lot of the discussion around this is in the Internet Engineering Task Force.

And that's really important because the extent to which this conversation can happen in an open standards environment is a really good thing.

So much of the dialogue around AI is happening within proprietary systems in these closed off environments.

And so while this is a really, really hard problem, I do want to at least acknowledge that it's happening in a space where organizations like CDT can participate actively, where publishers can participate, where owners of creative works can be part of the discussion.

And I think we're It's going to get worse in a sense that now it's no longer Google, Apple, and Microsoft, but you got OpenAI, and you got Anthropic, and you got God knows what other company.

And I guess what I'm saying is we need some more open standards for this stuff.

And I'm glad at least it's MD files.

But now how to get that across the different spaces, Yeah.

But here's where the design question gets really interesting.

Angelos argues the industry is moving away from closed AOL-style ecosystems and toward open standards.

Right.

And card networks are already rolling out agentic tokens.

Which is?

Open standards and software-defined frameworks.

The transition to these frameworks is literally what makes the AI revolution possible.

OK, let's look at our third story from Production 360.

We've witnessed a complete evolution today.

We started at the brain with AI agents from VizRT and Avid orchestrating the production, acting like telepathic librarians and veteran control room operators.

We moved to the software nervous system, holding it all together with open standards for Manifold and EVS and Matrox, turning physical train tracks into a shared digital whiteboard.

Then we looked at the veins and arteries, beaming this massive amount of data globally using the public internet and cellular bonding with net insight and live view.

Uh, by the way, you can tell us, like, what the pains were and the learnings from integrating with Starlink.

Um, and then we're just gonna create this, like, open standard for, for everybody to, to leverage this system." Um, and so that's the aim of this, this JV, right? They want to have open standards.

And interestingly, what s- what company works with open standards? That's ASC, right? Because the architecture is bent pipe.

Um, there's no processing that happens on the satellite itself in terms...

There's signal processing, but there's actually no, um Uh, processing of r- routing calls and things like that, that actually happens on the ground with the...

They saw what AST, the, the amount of commercial traction they're getting, and they're like, "Hey, we're gonna go do that too." So at least in theory, that's, that's the way that they wanna approach the market, right? More of a bent pipe.

The MNO controls, um, the routing, the customer, uh, and we're just here as infrastructure.

Um, the folks that are not doing open standards are Starlink.

There's a processing layer, the applications layers, and then where do we have the guardians that are able to then be flexible to live on top of kind of that distributed processing stack? And so there is an entire other version of this brief [laughs] at some point I would love to give for the ground side.

[laughs] You know, David, picking up your phone to look at the news, and believe it or not, the topic of open standards is coming up in the headlines of the news.

I mean, who would've thought that five years ago? So what role do open standards play in enabling coalition operations and helping governments adopt new technologies without becoming locked into this proprietary stuff?

Yeah.

St- standards is a great conversation.

It, um, it's one...

I actually wrote my PhD in modular open standards for satellites a long time ago.

The, uh...