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#3 · Dennis Hackethal, 5 months agoCommon standards often emerge voluntarily because people prefer objectivity and wish to avoid arbitrariness.
Consider communications technology and the web. Competing phone companies agree on standards for underlying technology so their customers can call each other. Developers of web browsers adopt common standards for the web. Developers of operating systems follow shared, cross-OS standards (called POSIX).
These standards result in objectivity, and they emerged without government involvement. People develop and agree upon such standards voluntarily because of the benefits they offer: without them, there’d be chaos. People generally don’t like chaos.
If someone decides to make a website that only supports a certain browser, or to only allow certain encoding methods in their phonelines, while that may exclude me from their services it does not violate my rights. If someone decides that they can steal my IP [intellectual property] and they have an agency that supports this view, they are violating my rights and are being protected in doing so.