Fury follows BT's surprise claim on hyperlinks

There's really no kind way of saying this, but no one likes large telecommunications companies. Because we are all beholden to them in this age of phone, fax, pager and Internet, they aren't exactly the most beloved of corporate entities. Perhaps only national tax authorities are the target of as much gnawing resentment.

Internet users in particular feel there must be a special circle of hell reserved for the telcos (maybe one in which they must perpetually say flattering things to each other as they cheerfully unbundle their local loops). Pick any geographic market, and the complaints are universal - telcos delay or avoid rolling out new Net access technologies; they say they'll offer services and promise price reductions that never arrive; they take forever to provide the connections you want and need; they sue each other and slow down new service offerings even further. Feel free to add on your own lovingly nursed complaint here.

Into this arena of scepticism and dulled expectations, there really are few things that a large telecommunications company can do any more to cause outrage and disbelief. We're well trained by now to accept the latest prevarication; we grimace and then we move on.

So hats off to BT, which, in one misguided action, last week actually managed to ignite global fury.

Followers of Net news will know that the British telco stunned Internet users by claiming to hold the patent for that Web building block, the hyperlink. And, BT says, it has every intention of enforcing it.

According to the company, it applied for the patent back in 1976, and got it in 1989 (then mysteriously hung around for another decade before bothering to tell the rest of us about it). It's as if the company announced it had a long-ago patent on the concept of a phone call, and was now going to demand a surcharge.

In a move that picks at the scab of several ongoing Net patent controversies, BT has sent out letters to a number of large, international Internet service providers stating that they'll be expected to pay up.

Company spokespeople have said BT will go after these big guys, rather than skimming more income off those of us who have our own little Web pages. Gee, thanks for that magnanimous gesture as you rock the very foundations of the Internet, guys.

Hyperlinks - clickable areas of Web pages that transfer you to other pages - are the substance of the Web. Indeed, without them there is no Web. They were central to the vision of the Web's acknowledged inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who imagined a gigantic, interlinked global resource that could be easily used by anyone.

Hyperlinks reduce a set of computer commands down to a simple click of the mouse, and truly make it a public medium, rather than a network for computer-knowledgeable specialists.

Mr Berners-Lee, though, didn't come up with the idea of hyperlinks. Another pair of researchers and visionaries, Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam, thought up the name about two decades earlier and worked on turning the concept into a technological reality.

In an article in Salon.com last week, Mr van Dam said they in turn had built on the ideas and work of researcher Douglas Englebart from the 1950s and 1960s. The general concept of the hyperlink goes back even further, to an adviser to US President Roosevelt named Vannevar Bush.

In 1945, he published a seminal essay in the Atlantic Monthly magazine entitled "As We May Think". The essay describes a personal computer-like machine called the Memex, which he imagined could store information and interlink it for easy retrieval.

The complexities of the growth of an intellectual idea aside, however, BT was certainly granted a patent for a hyperlink process and has an acknowledged place in the history and development of the Internet.

Let's also set aside the fact that any attempt to enforce this patent will immediately be challenged in the courts by those who will question whether the 1989 patent can be understood to include today's technical implementation of a hyperlink.

What truly boggles the mind about this case is its sheer stupidity in public relations terms. To lay claim utterly out of the blue to a technical element that has been in general use for half a decade makes the company look petty and greedy - especially when hyperlinks, like most of the Internet's structure, were assumed to be the result of collaborative development and refinement.

Internet users and researchers are furious and filled with total disbelief, as the response to the announcement has made clear, and BT has been blasted in the press and on Web discussion bulletin boards. As one post to the well-known developer discussion site Slashdot.org put it: "I wonder what big-wig at BT thought it would be a good idea to try to enforce this. Idiots."

BT has blundered right into a lose-lose situation. If the patent fails to hold up in court, everyone will hold the company in contempt for its narrowminded attempt to squeeze a revenue stream out of a basic bit of Net structure that everyone had believed was in the general domain.

If it holds up, everyone will scorn the company for the same reason.

How much more enlightened if the company had used the patent to enhance its image, by noting the contribution it had made to the development of the Net while letting the patent return to the public domain. Instead, as we wait to see what the courts say, we can be thankful that the Net's other extraordinary pioneers didn't think in this selfish way or the Internet might never have become a public network at all.

klillington@irish-times.ie