BUT profitability must be balanced with transparency to gain leadership. Increasing transparency is key to international legitimacy, but maintaining the current revenue structure is vital for the survival of the SDO industry.

Cameron F. Kerry, “Small yards, big tents: How to build cooperation on critical international standards,” Brookings Institute, 03-11-2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/small-yards-big-tents-how-to-build-cooperation-on-critical-international-standards/

Ultimately, it will fall on standards development organizations to do the most to broaden participation. The increased importance and visibility of standards places SDOs at a watershed—especially with respect to AI. No technology has ever achieved the level of adoption and awareness generative AI has over the past 18 months and, as the 2023 pace of initiatives on AI policy demonstrates, demand for technologies that are safe and trustworthy is widely felt. This puts a spotlight on major SDOs that deal with information technology.

In response, these SDOs will need to adapt their roles. Historically, they have operated primarily as industry organizations. They have evolved systems of consultation and convening toward consensus that have proved well-suited to the demands of technology and the marketplace and remain essential to effective standards development. For standards that combine social with technical components, however, SDOs must also take on broader roles as stewards of the public interest. This must include additional efforts toward transparency and accountability to the broader public, which will help legitimacy of their outcomes and strengthen insulation against undue influence from government industrial strategies or from other actors.

This evolution includes increasing transparency. The release of final standards is complicated by the dependence of most SDOs on subscriptions, memberships, or licensing for their revenue. They are nonprofits that cover costs of their activities with such revenues, and therefore place them behind paywalls. Although there are some alternative funding models, these revenues are chiefly what sustain the system of standardization.

SDOs nevertheless have been able to take steps toward access to some final standards. In the U.S., when standards are incorporated by reference into law or regulation, federal regulations require that such standards be “reasonably available,”115 which agencies can accomplish by posting them in read-only format on their websites during rulemaking or on the website of the copyright holder.116 Many individual SDOs as well as ANSI acting as a hub have taken steps over the past decade to provide access to standards on some basis; these include IEC, ISO, the British Standards Institute, and IEEE.117

Certain AI standards of public importance should be made publicly available, at least in read-only format, as ASTM International did with a standard for personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic,118 and IEEE has done with its GET program.119 At a minimum, such information should be available to those within certain defined categories, such as media, academia, and nonprofits, and could be protected from republication by nondisclosure agreements. A leading example of such a significant AI standard is the first risk management standard, ISO/ IEC 42001 issued in December 2023. This long-awaited standard addresses a common element of AI frameworks including the EU AI Act and the NIST RMF. ISO has recognized the public significance of such work by honoring the ISO/ IEC JTC 1/SC 42 committee with its annual standards leadership award in 2023 as “critical to addressing global challenges and accelerating progress toward a more sustainable, equitable and inclusive world.”120