Standards-Setting Practices: Competition, Innovation and Consumer Welfare

Amy A Marasco, Vice President and General Counsel, American National Standards Institute

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 4/18/2002)

The voluntary consensus standardization system in the United States is the most effective and efficient in the world. At the same time and almost incongruously, the U.S. system is distributed, diversified and extremely complex. This is in stark contrast to standards systems in many other nations of the world, where the government itself is the coordinator of standards or plays a major role in the financing or control of that nation's standards system. For more than 80 years, the U.S. system has been administered and coordinated by the private sector through ANSI, with the cooperation of federal, state and local governments. ANSI also is the established forum for the U.S. voluntary standardization community, and serves as the United States representative to two major, non-treaty international standards organizations: The International Organization for Standardization ("ISO") and, through the United States National Committee, the International Electrotechnical Commission ("IEC").