Standards often intersect with international trade in protectionist ways. All too often, policy makers have adopted laws and established regulations to protect domestic vendors in their home markets against competition from those abroad that would like to sell similar products into those markets. One goal of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade to which countries that have acceded to the World Trade Organization are signatory is to prevent just such standards-based barriers to trade.
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In the ‘arranged marriage’ of states and markets there are always tensions between serving the needs of individual citizens and consumers versus serving the collective good. Few areas of policy are immune from these debates and standards, as well as global standardization, certainly are not.

Standards and standardisation are becoming more politicized. So what does this mean for the economy and especially for growth sectors of the economy or those which are politically sensitive, such as energy, communications and the Internet?
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Standardization work is essential to the credibility and scalability of Green IT, and thus for the ICT industry’s ambitions of supplying the world with solutions for combating climate change.
There is much focus today on smart grids. In Sweden, the Zigbee trials demonstrate the necessity for open standards because we want to keep our opportunities open for the new applications that might come. In order for such trials to be economically feasible there must be a perception that smart technology invented in one corner of the world may be used in other corners as well
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