Save the Standardization Ecosystem

Developed by Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), technical standards are published documents that establish specifications and procedures designed to maximize the reliability of the materials, products, methods, and/or services people use every day. They are strategic tools for raising safety and environmental performance as well as ensuring interoperability. They can drive innovation, competitiveness, sustainability, and consumer protection, while helping to aggregate markets, facilitate technology diffusion, and promote production efficiency as well as product and systems interoperability. They result from collective work by experts in a field and provide a consensus of those experts at the time when the standards are developed and help to make life simpler and increase the reliability and the effectiveness of many of the goods and services we use every day.

Types of standards include performance standards, prescriptive standards, design standards, management system standards and service standards. They can be voluntary or mandatory. They are different from Acts and regulations.

Standards benefit various groups of society, including consumers, businesses, governments and civil society groups. They help provide safer products and services, enhanced purchasing power, simplicity and comparability of systems, devices or components and improved social and economic well-being. They also help governments oversee regulatory environments that encourage competitiveness of businesses while ensuring the safety of consumers.

They are useful in tackling many issues because they provide a structured, relatively neutral process that brings together various or disparate parties together to achieve consensus.

SDOs develop standards through a consensus-driven process involving multiple stakeholders, including industry experts, academics, government representatives and consumer advocates. SDOs are responsible for creating, developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, and maintaining technical standards that address the needs of industries, technologies and public safety. SDOs play a critical role in ensuring consistency, safety, interoperability and quality across various sectors by establishing standards that serve as guidelines for products, processes, systems and people.

The measures can have a profound negative impact on the standardization ecosystem.  Undermining copyright protections threatens SDOs ability to sustain their critical work, thereby disrupting the bottom-up standardization process, challenging international cooperation, and eroding trust in standards that protect consumers.

An SDO’s inability to sustainably support standards development activities will have a direct adverse impact on the quality and accuracy of technical standards over time. The measures that some governments are considering and/or putting in place will create a barrier impeding SDOs’ work to support market competitiveness and innovation, effectively suffocating the ongoing development of market-relevant standards based upon open, consensus-based, rigorous, balanced standards development processes. Implementing diminished technical standards or lesser quality standards will be a direct consequence of compromised SDO capabilities and creates a direct risk to the public.

The SDO is the guardian of the industry standard, both for maintenance of the standard and for ensuring that others do not change the standard in a way that creates incompatibilities or security issues. SDO’s are able to do this via their copyright ownership. SDOs copyright ownership is a key element for protecting the integrity of the standard. It is why technology works. It is why people can use one technology worldwide. The ability to oversee and manage standard development and maintenance is especially key for global SDOs because broad participation helps prevent any one geographic region from imposing its will on others. SDOs ensure that there is consensus.

Threatening the copyright of SDOs threatens the integrity of the consensus standards development process, which is crucial to supporting global trade and protecting consumers. In addition, the financial impact from loss of copyright threatens SDOs’ very ability to generate standards because of the need to provide rigorous process management and oversight, as well as perpetual maintenance of standards, all of which is expensive.

The critical work of SDOs drives safety and interoperability.

Consensus-based standards developed in an open and rigorous process result in effective standards promoting safety and human welfare. Safety for the public and the technical community of users are forged when a broad range of stakeholders participate and the public review process ensures all ideas and proposals are thoroughly tested before being incorporated into the resulting standard. The resulting standard also allows interoperability across multiple interests and technologies, rather than a single, vendor-specific, proprietary solution.

The critical work of SDOs drives innovation.

SDOs—typically non-profit or quasi-governmental entities—develop and update standards through a rigorous, multi-sector, voluntary consensus process that is open to all interested parties. This often involves competing interests or industry competitors working to reach a consensus. Because of the diligent oversight and strict rules established by consensus SDOs—including the expensive oversight to guard against anticompetitive activities—the interests of market-dominant players in an industry are balanced by the inputs of other participants, including consumer advocates, government representatives, and startups.

The critical work of SDOs drives global competition.

IEEE is a global standardization body. An industry standard, especially a global industry standard, can determine the baseline technologies for an industry worldwide and enhance global trade. As the global economy continues to advance and global challenges increase, standards have growing strategic importance, therefore it is critical to maintain a strong standards ecosystem to support future innovation across various sectors. When participants join a standards development working group, the collaborative work product (i.e., the standard) is owned by the neutral, unbiased SDO, which makes it available to all interested parties on a non-discriminatory basis. This ensures that all interests are considered, and no one participant controls the standard or revisions of the standard. That is one reason SDOs owning the copyright is so important. It creates a trust that allows standards development to work.

When a government or regulatory agency seeks to include technical standards developed by SDOs into regulation, statute or rule, they will reference the standard in part or whole. Not all SDOs approach incorporation by reference of their standards the same. Some SDOs lobby or seek incorporation by reference into law or regulations. However, many SDOs, like IEEE, do not. For the majority of these SDOs, their standards may be referenced but they are never notified, meaning that they are never even given the opportunity to make the standard publicly available and preserve their copyright ownership.

Many SDOs, including IEEE, offer free, public access to incorporated standards through reading rooms where those interested can access the standards to read them.

• We encourage you to understand the issues and what is at stake. This includes the disruption and serious consequences on the global standardization ecosystem impacting society and industry at a time when standards are needed the most–when we are facing serious challenges with respect to climate, energy, security, health, and well-being.
• We encourage you to take action to protect the health and sustainability of the Global Standardization Ecosystem by reaching out to your respective government bodies and policymakers.