Standards Development, Disruptive Innovation and the Nature of Participation: Lock-In, Lock-Out, Holdup

John W. Bagby, Prasenjit Mitra, and Sandeep Purao

6/25/2014
(Original Publish Date: 8/15/2006)

Standardization processes are quickly replacing regulation and competition as the primary method that technical specifications are deployed as rules, guidelines, or definitions of characteristics that ensure materials, products, processes and services are consistently fit for their purposes. Importantly, for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), there is an evolution in the process used by standards-development organizations (SDOs) and this is changing the prevailing standards development activity (SDA) for ICT. The process is progressing away from traditional SDA modes: the legacy de jure standards promulgation by regulators that typically involve the selection from many candidates and existing alternative components. Increasingly, standards development is moving towards voluntary consensus consortia, venues in which there is a more design intensive crafting of standards that include a substantial design component, also known as “anticipatory” standards. Standards that include a substantial design component require increasingly important roles from organizational players as well as SDOs. These processes are increasingly characterized by the presence of intellectual property rights and collective behaviors alleged to trigger legal issues in antitrust, the First Amendment and tort law. An analysis of recent and likely influential series of holdup cases, such as the Rambus appeal, is also instructive.