In May, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on the use of standardization as a political tool to face an increasingly global economy. Contributors were asked to discuss a number of issues including: the role that governments should play in international standards initiative, and the consequences of this involvement such as non-tariff barriers to trade.
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The interjection of nationalist politics into standards setting, particularly in areas where global technological coordination is important for increasing the supply of and access to public goods, is of considerable concern. Globalization of trade, investment and technology flows places increasing pressures on national regulations of all kinds, ranging from competition regulation to financial standards such as capital requirements. Whether and how these regulations should be subject to greater multilateral or global coordination is a central policy issue.

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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.
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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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In the discussion around global standards and global politics, one of the questions we are discussing is:

Under what scenarios will increased political involvement result in strategically adapted national standards, that foster unilateral interests, as opposed to globally coordinated standards, that serve common interests?

The statement reveals a dichotomy: That of national standards vs global standards, in that it assumes there are only two interests in this discussion which are either national or global. However, there is a third – more important motivation for standards – that of companies to solve problems.

But why are we discussing the issue in the first place?

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IT has truly gone global. Never before has it been so true as with cloud computing. Laws and policies, including procurement rules, that restrict IT choice now have implications for a nation’s ability to take advantage of cloud computing and impairs its participation in the modern, global heterogeneous IT marketplace.
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