The Standardization Eco-System: Policy and Patents

Standards have been crucial to the advancement of commerce and therefore the welfare of mankind. One can think of examples such as the track gauge of railways or the metric system of measurements. Worldwide adoption of such standards was generally through commercial osmosis necessitated by the minimal interruption to the exchange of goods between countries and different regions of the world. In the modern communication sector, ordinary citizens are familiar with the visible and ubiquitous nature of WiFi and cellular networks. Making these indispensable modern conveniences happen are many standards that govern spectrum usage, wavelengths/ frequencies, data structure, error correction, packet transmission, and numerous other technologies of both the wireless and underlying wireline transmission systems. (One can also speak the same about the successful permeation in the use of the Internet.) While some aspects are led by governments (such as spectrum allocation), the overwhelming majority of standards are developed by industry players coming together in global standards organizations such as the ITU-T, IETF, IEEE, ISO, IEC, W3C, 3GPP, ETSI, etc., whose main goal is to develop standards that can be adopted voluntarily in countries worldwide, again for inter-connectivity and inter-operability. In some countries, the government may choose to play a stronger role in certain sectors (such as information security) or aspects (conformance and testing) of the standards eco-system or overseeing that country’s approach to standards development and subsequent use.