Standard Setting Committees

Tim Simcoe, J.L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

2/28/2008
(Original Publish Date: 12/1/2006)

Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) create new compatibility standards through an explicit search for consensus. However, practitioners and policymakers have expressed concern that the SSO decision-making process is increasingly “politicized” and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This paper considers the problem of strategic maneuvering within SSOs. I develop a simple model of committee standard setting and test its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet. The empirical results suggest that an observed slowdown in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts at the IETF created by the rapid commercialization of the Internet.