Open Standards and the Role of Politics

Rajiv C. Shah, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Illinois-Chicago, and Jay P. Kesan, Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

12/06/2007
(Original Publish Date: 5/1/2007)

A necessary part of digital government is the use of standards that allow for technologies to interconnect and interoperate. A growing debate among the technical and policy community is whether governments should provide preferential treatment to open standards over de facto or proprietary standards. In this paper, we discuss our preliminary research into open standards. A core finding is that scholars and policymakers need to recognize the role of politics at many phases from the development to the adoption of open standards. By focusing on the role of politics, we are able to offer a number of useful proposals for addressing issues around open standards.