THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN ICT STANDARDIZATION

Today, a building in the United States with public access must by law be accessible to those with disabilities – but a computer program does not, even if the inability to use it might be a bar to employment. As modern society becomes ever more dependent on information and communications technology, both the private sector as well as the public sector ...

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 essential services continue to redeploy across the Internet, the workplace becomes ever more IT dependent, and paper public records give ...

Last August, the Commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously to find semiconductor designer Rambus, Inc. guilty of abusing the standards system, but deferred a penalty verdict pending further testimony and deliberations.  In February they issued their verdict, and capped the royalties that Rambus could earn to license its SDRAM patents to implement the JEDEC standard at issue.&...

Legislators in three states (thus far) this year have introduced coordinated bills uniformly addressing a key standards-related policy issue: how can governments best protect public records?

What could be more boring than a standard listing arbitrarily assigned three-letter codes identifying languages? You might be surprised.