Standardization and the Democratic Design of Information and Communication Technology

Eric Iversen, Theirry Vedel, research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, and Raymund Werle, Researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

8/22/2008
(Original Publish Date: 10/1/2003)

In 1974, a US congressional subcommittee report emphasized the need to secure equitable access to voluntary technical standardization.i This report warned of committee standardization’s tendency to structurally exclude relevant interests from participating in the shaping of technical standards and that the internationalization of standards development organizations (SDOs) threatens to further remove this activity - which is particularly important to network technologies - from the reach of those who would be affected by decisions made here. Since these issues were raised in a public policy framework thirty years ago, voluntary standardization has increased many times in importance especially for the elaboration of information and communications technology (ICT), a multipurpose network technology. The ICT standardization regime has undergone a comprehensive phase of proliferation and internationalization in step with emerging (and merging) information and communication technologies. The landscape of SDOs is global and fragmented, and there is no indication that it develops towards a unitary system even though some observers would find it attractive to cut back the organizational plethora.