The Consensus Erosion Pattern

The history of encryption governance shows what happens when stakeholder consensus erodes: governance fails, and the resulting conflict harms all parties.

The pattern:

1. Initial consensus forms: NSA, NSF, and academia reached agreement in 1979 on legitimate national security interests in cryptography and appropriate limits on review
2. Consensus erodes: As commercial use cases grew, public and private sector priorities diverged; the private sector felt excluded from decisionmaking
3. Governance continues without consensus: Export controls on encryption products persisted despite growing opposition
4. Outcomes harm everyone:
   • U.S. software industry lost market share to foreign competitors
   • Significant, lasting animosity and loss of trust in government
   • Bad security outcomes: weak “export-grade” cryptography became embedded in standards, creating vulnerabilities that persisted for decades

The lesson isn’t that governance should never happen without consensus. It’s that pushing forward on governance after consensus collapses leads to courses of action detrimental to all parties, often without achieving the original goals.

Related: 05-atom—physical-vs-nonphysical-governance, 05-molecule—ai-governance-analogues-comparison