The Europeans (governments) fund their standards development, China asserts its standards development and the US ignores its standards development. There does not appear, at least to me, to be any information that indicates that one of these approaches has been better than the others. With the exception of GSM (3G) the Europeans have little to show for the government funding of standardization.
And I (and others) can argue that GSM was successful for many reasons independent of European funding. The Chinese are controlling standardization to gain back some control of their markets which they ceded when their companies were not active in earlier standardization activities. The Chinese cellular standards (TD-SCDMA etc.) will just be a mode of operation in multi-mode devices. However this will allow Chinese companies to cross license rather than pay for other technologies (e.g., W-CDMA). Over the longer term the Chinese are now active in standardization and thusly appear to be willing to accept the future standardization outputs of such efforts. So where is the benefit of greater government involvement in standardization for countries that are already active in standardization?
Perhaps SmartGrid standards are an indication that government action is needed. The jury is still out I think. In the US federal funds are certainly speeding and increasing SmartGrid standardization activities. But whether this turns out to be desirable or undesirable (telephony standards evolved over long periods of time) I don’t think anyone can foretell. I suggest that the emergence of slightly different smartgrids in each power company’s market area is almost guaranteed (same as cable in the US) and conversion gateways will be used to support interworking between these different systems as required. Whether or not the different smartgrids are slightly different or greatly different will be an annoyance not a significant problem.
My suggestion is based on a belief that standardization is a tiny part of the on-going process of evolution. No standard is the “best.” Each standard just serves a purpose for a span of time to be superseded by other technologies and associated standards. Having government direction, even very well meaning direction, will not make better standards. No one is in a position to understand what a better standard is. That is the real reason why it may be better in new and very large systems to have many different approaches attempted.
There are exceptions: Government involvement in health and safety standards is based on a more important metric of efficiency – saving lives. I am quite willing to accept this view of efficiency and ignore evolutionary processes (which do not recognize life as higher priority) for such standards. E.g., the form of the health record matters little relative to the lives saved by having common health records.
But baring health and safety exceptions, evolution is a process of minimizing risk, which is accomplished by supporting many different variants, not maximizing efficiency. Newtonian thinking suggests that the most efficient variation should be identified initially. Newtonian thinking is only practical for simple well defined systems. It does not scale.
