Today, standards are set by vendors at the top and imposed on end-users at the bottom. The increasingly complex realities of a wired world will sometimes make this an ineffective approach that will ill serve vendors and end-users alike. In this article, we introduce the concept of the Personal DataSphere, and ask whether the end product of its inevitable development will represent the first triumph of the standard setting methods of the future, or a failure to move on from the outmoded methods of the past.