Standards Today

Should you care where your standards come from?

Consensus on what constitutes an 'open standard' has always been difficult to achieve. In this article, I review the norms of openness required by traditional SDOs and modern consortia in light of their goals, as well as the traditional and ...

While network effects provide great benefits, they can also lead to great risks. The Internet is increasingly becoming the unique host for essential services, as government, finance, energy management, supply chains, telephony and much more abandon traditional channels and migrate ...

Since the passage of the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995, government has by law taken a back seat to the private sector in standards development. For years, the national interest has been well-served by the "bottom up" standards ...

The last 25 years have been marked by an explosion of consortia formed to develop, promote and otherwise support ICT standards. The reasons for creating a new consortium include the absence of appropriate technical expertise, interest, and/or supporting programs in ...

For over 100 years, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has fulfilled a vital role in supporting industry, science, public safety and more. In the standards arena, its mission has focused primarily on defining and enabling the measurement of weights ...

For decades, legal structures of various kinds have been developed to support collaborative activity, all referred to generically as "consortia." While superficially quite different, each addresses the same core needs in its own way. In this article, I examine the ...

Standards organizations and governments have been working on Electronic Health Records for many years. In this article I describe the complexities that make the creation of EHRs difficult, survey the current state of the EHR art, describe the public and ...

Before there were electronic documents, information could only be gathered by hand from multiple sources, and then combined into new documents that in turn became static. The same would be true for electronic documents today, if it weren't for the ...

Software that could be freely edited existed long before proprietary programs became the norm — but then it largely disappeared. When source-available, "free and open software" (FOSS) reemerged in the marketplace, it did so in a manner that was novel ...

Our headlong rush to migrate almost all key aspects of modern society to the Internet means that we must design new virtual defenses to emulate the walls and bars, guards and locks that protect us in the physical world. In ...

Not long ago, simply upgrading the aging U.S. electric grid to the state of the digital art to reduce power failures seemed like a big challenge. Now, the upgrade is intended to do much more: increase national security by ...

Governments represent some of the most complex enterprises in existence, typically comprising multiple "silos" of high-value information trapped within proprietary legacy systems. Government CIOs today are struggling to upgrade their vast IT systems to exchange information across the enterprise, even ...

On February 25, 120 delegates from 40 countries will arrive in Geneva, Switzerland to review the proposed resolution of 3,522 comments on OOXML. What a long, strange trip it's been.Download PDF

In contrast to many other nations, the United States employs a "bottom up" standards development process that is driven by industry rather than government. That system permits new products and services to be swiftly introduced into a competitive marketplace, but ...

Until the advent of the Internet, the acquisition of knowledge was a slow and linear process of discovery/review/publish/read and start the cycle once again. The legal system that evolved to support that process ranked the rights of ...

The history of humanity demonstrates an ongoing evolution in the balancing of the rights of the individual with those of society. Only in modern times have many of the civil rights we hold to be most dear become recognized and ...

The role of the traditional global standards organization has been to adopt standards that have been found to be of acceptable technical quality to those National Bodies with an interest in the subject matter. In the modern world of information ...

In centuries past, colonial powers used the cheap labor provided by their new subjects to extract resources, and their new colonies as captive markets for their own manufactured goods. Today, similar results can be achieved with much less effort when ...

The negative impacts comprehended by the tragedy of the commons are becoming more frequent and urgent with increasing population and industrialization. Perhaps only through a rethinking of property rights will individuals and nations be able to agree on the laws ...

The modern standards development infrastructure is largely the product of the industrial age, and evolved to address the needs of such an economy. The advent of the Internet and the Web, and the continuing introduction of new ICT-based products and ...

Standards are about sharing intellectual property rights (IPR), but only with the permission of those that own them. As a result, the risk and reality of IPR infringement provides one of the greatest challenges to the creation and implementation of ...

Governments interact with standards as developers (when they draft laws), adopters (when they reference standards in regulations), influencers (when they join SSOs), and as end-users. To date, government involvement with ICT standards has been light. But as more and more ...

Structuring a new organization to successfully – and safely - create and promote standards requires a knowledge of corporate, antitrust, trademark, tax, and intellectual property law. Doing it properly is essential to achieving success.  

There's no "how to" manual for creating a consortium, leaving those charged with setting one up to largely copy another's structure. In this first of two articles, I review the key areas to be considered, and approaches to be taken, ...

Standard setting organizations, like their members, vary widely in their effectiveness in setting standards and their success in getting them adopted.  Defining the goals to be pursued in a given standards area and finding the right SSO in which ...

Since WW II a complex infrastructure of human rights declarations, treaties, commissions and courts has been created at the global and regional level to identify, secure, and at times intervene to protect, human rights of all types. But the task ...

The ICT sector is particularly dependent on achieving interoperability through compliance with appropriate standards, and on maintaining end-user trust in compliance.  But developing robust compliance tests is expensive, and the number of products to test is usually too small ...

Ex ante disclosure of licensing terms is not a monolithic concept.  In fact, ex ante  benefits can be accomplished in a variety of different ways, some already in existence, some currently under discussion, and others that have not ...

Open standards must be fixed in order to be useful, but open source software is constantly evolving. And while open standards can prevent vendor lock-in, open source licensing terms guarantee vendors the ability to achieve that end. Is there a ...

There are many identifiable groups that are affected by the creation of standards, each with its own reasons for being interested in the outcome of the development process. The nature of these distinct motivations leads some types of stakeholders to ...

While some standard wars are destructive, others can better be seen as competitive contests in emerging network-dependent technologies. And, as in the real world, there are not only wars, but lesser conflicts and escalations as well, each of which can ...

New standards are being developed in multiple areas to enable the emergence of the digital home, from environmental controls, to networking, to home entertainment, and more. The rapid evolution of the ecosystem of standard setting organizations (both old and new) ...

There was far too much news in 2005 to summarize in one story (or issue), so in this third annual review of the news we pick the most newsworthy standards development organization, standards story, open source story, and more.

For the last four years, the nations of the world assembled in the WSIS process have spent more time wrangling over "who should govern the Internet" than how to bridge the Digital Divide. Perhaps now that a compromise (of sorts) ...

Standards have traditionally addressed discrete, immutable problems that derive from the laws of physics and nature. The regulations and standards that will be needed to address complex environmental issues will face a greater challenge: how to achieve desired results where ...

On September 21, 2005 Massachusetts became the first government in the world to adopt strict rules intended to break its dependency on software applications that create documents that they fear may become inaccessible over time. We interview all of the major players ...

Governments and standard setting organizations (SSOs) have much in common, as well as important differences. They also need to work closely together in pursuit of common goals. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses can lead to a more effective and efficient ...

More than 50 SSOs create standards that are needed to create and support space missions. In this article we describe those that are most involved and their areas of expertise, in order to present a picture of standard setting for space ...

In this exclusive interview, Tim Berners-Lee explains what the Semantic Web can do for you, what you can do for the Semantic Web, what challenges lie ahead, and why it all matters

hroughout most of the Twentieth Century, the world worked to create a rational, centralized, democratic system of standard setting. Then, a significant portion of one industry opted out when the demands on that system changed. Now, the system is once ...

China's long march to accession to the WTO resulted in the loss of its ability to impose protectionist tariffs, and limited its ability to set domestic standards. In response, it has developed one of the most formidable standard setting infrastructures ...

Is "openness" (as in open standards) in the eye of the beholder, or are there fundamental and unalterable principles upon which all should agree? The answer to this question is crucial -- and is somewhere in between.

The creation and use of "commonalities" (of which standards are but a recent example) has been part of human history for thousands of years. What we can learn from this phenomenon merits closer and more serious study.

Traditionally, the United States government has paid scant attention to voluntary consensus standards. But in 1980, that began to change. In this article, we review the laws that require the Federal agencies to use and support standards, and how they go ...

Some stories from last year continued to be active, while others sank from sight. And, of course, many new ones emerged on a daily basis. Here is the standards news of 2004 that we think was most important, and why.

Most people who create a standard setting organization have never done so before, and may not even have participated in one. Here's how to set up the technical process, from soup to nuts.

The United Nations has a multi-billion dollar budget and too often fails to create consensus around the most vital issues of the day, while the global standard setting infrastructure operates on a shoe string, and maintains hundreds of thousands of ...

The IT economy enables a new form of non-market, non-corporate activity to exist: "networked peer production", of which Open Source software is but one example. Networked peer production makes possible the realization of an alternative, post-capitalist economic vision based on ...

More and more end users are becoming interested in open source products, but some have doubts about the security, support, risk of infringement and completeness of open source software. What are the stumbling blocks between here and broad adoption, and ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

From the days of VisiCalc until today, software -- and software patents -- have come a long way. The patent system itself, on the other hand, is still where it was before the PC was invented. It's time for a ...

When word leaked out that global standards organization ISO was thinking about charging for the use of the currency, language and country codes that lie embedded in software and webpages, it set off an immediate storm of negative reaction.

Which consortium supports "universal access, the semantic Web, trust, interoperability, evolvability, decentralization, and cooler multimedia" -- and has more than 30 Working Groups busy doing just that?

Five different "friend of the court" briefs have been filed in support of Infineon's bid to gain Supreme Court review of the recent Federal Circuit ruling favoring Rambus. One brief was filed by a group of 15 States and Puerto Rico; ...

Thousands of companies are members of hundreds of standard setting organizations (SSOs). The methods such companys use for selecting these organizations are largely a mystery to those outside this small circle and, in fact, there seems to be little centralized ...

For web services to impact the market as expected, standards must be of high technical quality, trusted and widely adopted. The best standards bodies to create them will ultimately be decided by the marketplace itself.

The modern technology-based world is increasingly dependent on the "global standard setting infrastructure," made up of diverse processes and types of organizations. All are essential to the result and the value of each should be recognized and supported by Congress.

Some people would compare the excitement of keeping up with standard setting to watching the grass grow. Faced with this type of attitude, how can a consortium or SDO get the word out to those who need to hear it? ...

Last year, the standard setting world took comfort when the FTC opened an investigation against Rambus relating to its conduct in the JEDEC standard setting process. The government also issued a warning to all not to "game" the standard setting ...

Few things change as fast as the world of technology, so why should the standards world be any different? This editorial, and the stories that follow, highlight the way in which standard setting mirrors, keeps pace with, and in turn ...

Rambus sues Infineon for patent infringement; Infineon sues Rambus for abuse of the JEDEC standards process; The Federal Trade Commission opens an investigation against Rambus for standards process abuse, and considers industry-wide guidelines to regulate the standards process. Meanwhile, the ...