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.
