In 2001 the United Nations commissioned the “World Summit on the Information Society”, (WSIS) a multi-million dollar, multi-year global initiative to bring the benefits of the Internet Age to all of the peoples of the world. Now the WSIS has claimed the right for global government to “govern” the Internet. What happens next?
CONSORTIA, STANDARDS AND THE USER EXPERIENCE
Ecommerce and email usage are growing rapidly – and so are Spam, phishing, spoofing, and identity theft. A squadron of new consortia with a wide range of tactics has recently been launched in response, each by a different constituency that is threatened by the rise in cyber security abuse.
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE DELIVERS A MAJOR STANDARDS REPORT
The federal government in the United States doesn’t become activist in the standards area often. But when trade barriers begin to block U.S. goods, the Department of Commerce can swing into action.
NISO FINDS ITS OWN ROAD
What do you call an accredited SDO that gives its standards away, creates standards for everything from stable paper for perpetual archiving to client/server service and protocol standards for information retrieval? Oh, and they also butt heads with the IETF over the namespace identifiers. You call it “NISO”.
A RETREAT FROM PROCESS QUALITY
Coteries of companies develop specifications and shop them to consortia; Microsoft wants the industry to adopt (and license) its Caller ID anti-spam specifications; open source projects are everywhere (and variously structured); and Bloggers are flaming each other over competing flavors of content syndication. Is this any way to develop standards?
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE: THE ACCELERATING RATE OF CHANGE
In this article, we review how the standard setting methods of today evolved in the past, the forces that are reshaping how we create standards in the present, and seven trends that will have a dramatic impact on standard setting in the future.
Standards 2003: The Year in Review
Web services initiatives exploded; the courts handed down surprise rulings on standard setting misbehavior, browser patents and public ownership of standards; Europe and China used standards to erect trade barriers; and royalty-free policies proliferated – to name just a few of the standards trends of 2003.