Global standards that are developed by technology companies with products and services in the relevant technology arenas, together with government/regulatory or public participation, can be pro competitive and innovation enhancing. Such global standards hold the promise that interoperable and compatible technologies across continents can be realized.

While these benefits are alluring, they can turn elusive and indeed detrimental to global competition and free trade very quickly unless some pitfalls are recognized and astutely avoided.

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In April, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on the topic of formal review/ranking of Standard Setting Organisations (SSO). Contributors were asked to discuss whether such review/ranking of SSOs would foster or impede efficient standardization?

Ajit Jaokar argued that any “standards for standards” effort risked the creation of a “class system between consortia” based on an arbitrary set of criteria and will only be more difficult to apply as new innovation becomes increasingly cross-domain (e-health, Mobile health, etc).

Helen Disney, arguing that the priority of an SSO should be promotion of both competition and innovation, identified the criticism that formal review creates more bureaucracy within the standard setting organisations and as such may slow change in dynamic markets such as the IT sector.
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Rankings are becoming more and more popular in order to assess individuals, institutions or even countries according various criteria like wealth, innovativeness or economic performance. Crucial for such rankings are the selection and the weighting of the criteria. The more complex the issue addressed by such a ranking, like the innovation performance of economies, the more criteria have to be integrated and the more effort has to be invested in the development of an adequate weighting of the criteria.
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The notion of creating standards for standards setting organizations not a new one, but it certainly has attracted more discussion and interest over the past 18 months. The challenge I see with this movement is less in coming up with the types of broad criteria that would be helpful to individual participants in the standards setting ecosystem, there are a host of useful research projects that have done just that over the years. Instead, my concern is related to the idea that there is a single exhaustive set of criteria and moreover a single formula through which those criteria can be passed to create an assessment or comparison of SSOs. Moreover, whatever a systematic or formulaic process such as this might inform us about the SSO itself, I am concerned that it doesn’t guarantee anything with respect to several of the key attributes of individual standards themselves, namely that they be of high quality, relevant and most importantly that they obtain market acceptance.
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Rankings can usefully contribute to inform users/consumers in a large variety of areas about the options that are available to them. They can also help them to make a well informed choice. To be useful, rankings need to be objective and informative, and rely on sound methodology and data. The methodology and data used to rank people, companies, institutions, countries, etc will often be criticized. Ranking of academic institutions are for instance highly controversial. Besides the fact they are not necessarily accurate, they may also induce universities to focus on issues that will improve their ranking rather than those that may ameliorate the welfare of their students and professors. There are therefore pros and cons about rankings.
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The crux and, indeed, the most challenging aspect of standards creation is the ability of different standards to promote both competition and innovation. Today there are many different approaches to setting standards, including de facto standards set informally through the market and formal standards established by governments or standard setting organisations (SSOs). There are also standards involving proprietary efforts and those based on collaborative or open efforts.
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We have just completed a new working paper that surveys the SSOs involved in web standardization. It is available for download as pdf here: web-standards-090828-final. Comments welcome! See also http://www.talkstandards.com/?p=1288, Mattias Ganslandt

Mention “competition” and “standard setting” in the same sentence and you’re likely to get a wide assortment of reactions. I offer a few thoughts on several layers of competition and how they can affect emerging standards.
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On 2 June 2006, the Danish parliament (the Folketing) unanimously adopted Parliamentary Resolution B103 on the use of open standards for software in the public sector. The Resolution instructs the Government to ensure that the public sector’s use of information technology, including the use of software, should be based on open standards.
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Is an “open” standards development the best route to interoperability? It’s hard to say.
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