ABSTRACT: A Proposal for a New Type of Global Standards Certification

Andrew Updegrove, Partner, Gesmer Updegrove LLP

4/04/2008
(Original Publish Date: 10/1/2007)

The traditional standards infrastructure was developed over more than a century to meet the needs of developed nations for standards for implementation in physical products. That infrastructure created standards at the national level that could be adopted for global use by one of a number of organizations that evolved to serve the needs of defined market sectors. In modern times, the information technology sector largely opted out of this structure, choosing to develop standards through organizations with global, rather than national, memberships, and only occasionally submitting standards for approval by traditional global organizations. Later, but to a lesser extent, the communications technology sector followed suit. Today with the ongoing process of globalization, the advent of the Internet and the Web, and the redeployment of most commercial, financial and government services over these new global networks, there is a need not only for a new global standards body to ensure the vitality of ITC standards creation, but for the availability of new types of institutional certifications for consortia and accredited standards organizations as well. Such certifications could provide additional information to differentiate one organization, and its standards, from another, offering governments and end-users with the ability to drive standard setting in more commercially and socially useful directions, thereby increasing choice, and fostering important social goals such as free trade, energy conservation and sustainability of resources. In this article, I identify these needs, and propose new structures that could be created to pursue these salutary results.