Photo: Nevermind2

A couple of weeks ago I was at San Diego where I chaired an event at CTIA.

Whenever I am in a foreign country (which is often…), I try to get some insights from local Taxi drivers. On one such taxi ride, I mentioned to the driver that back home (in the UK), we drive on the left hand side of the road. To which he remarked: ‘Well, why don’t they (UK) drive on the right like everyone else in the world…’

Out of curiosity, I asked him where else had he traveled so far considering his comment about ‘everyone else in the world’ to which he replied: ‘Canada and Mexico.’

I have to smile… But on a more serious note, having once lived in New Zealand there is a country which did something unprecedented.
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Photo: Xavier Häpe

The World Standards Day 2009 conference ‘European Standardisation for the next decade’ organised by the European Commission was also used to publish the issue paper of the EXPRESS group. Several issues were up for debate by expert panels.
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1. The decimal system
2. The latin alphabet
3. English (as a Lingua Franca)
4. Standard time
5. The US Dollar
6. The metric system
7. Internet Protocol
8. GSM
9. HTML
10. SMTP/MIME

It is relatively easy to come up with standards for communication – formal and informal – that facilitates exchange and contributes to the functioning of the global economy in a very fundamental way. It is much harder to identify quality standards with the same widespread use and undisputed global value.
I would like to argue that this pattern is no coincidence. Standards for exchange and communication solves a coordination problem and are typically self-enforcing, i.e. they are unilaterally beneficial to all users. Standards for exchange also lack distributional problems.

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World Standards Day is celebrated each year on 14 October to pay tribute to the efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who collaborate within IEC, ISO and ITU to develop voluntary International Standards that facilitate trade, spread knowledge and disseminate technological advances.

In its groundbreaking report published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited technical standards, like those published by the IEC, ISO and ITU, as a means of mitigating climate change now, while offering the potential to reduce its effects in the future as new technologies are developed and mature.
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We are afraid today about important economy using standards as barriers to trade or as imposing views on other parts of the world. But is that different behaviour than other large countries did in the past or still do?
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I recently wrote a brief comment on Chinese ICT standardization (http://www.talkstandards.com/?p=1293). The political involvement touched upon in that article is particularly evident in the telecom area as this article tries to explain.
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I recently wrote a brief comment on Chinese ICT standardization (http://www.talkstandards.com/?p=1293). The political involvement touched upon in that article is particularly evident in the telecom area as this article tries to explain.
Read More…