China has the lead now.

Lindsay Gorman, “The U.S. Needs to Get in the Standards Game—With Like-Minded Democracies,” Lawfare, 04-02-2020, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/us-needs-get-standards-game%E2%80%94-minded-democracies

The CCP has seized on the importance of these bodies for the dual and mutually reinforcing objectives of increasing national competitiveness and building international influence on technology adoption and norms of use. With an explicit goal of becoming “a standards-issuing country,” China coordinates national standards-work across government, industry and academia as part of its push to increase international influence. Its “China Standard 2035” plan, led by the Standards Administration of China and its National Academy of Engineering is dedicated to assessing China’s standardization system and developing standards across virtual reality, information technologies, 5G and the internet of things (IoT). As part of its national plan for IoT development, China’s “Special Project Action Plan for Standards Formulation” calls for China to “actively promote the formation of regional and international IoT standardization bodies, win leadership positions on important international committees like ISO/IEC [a joint technical committee of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission] and ITU, and submit and respond to international proposals and motions, in order to increase China’s international influence and competitiveness.” Even state-sponsored academics have applied game theory to optimize China’s strategy in the standardization process.

The military and cyber-espionage implications of China’s growing standards dominance is equally alarming. A U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report has assessed that “Chinese-backed international standards offers Beijing unparalleled opportunities to compromise trillions of potential future IoT devices through security vulnerabilities it has researched and locked in though international standards bodies, with little or no built-in transparency on these vulnerabilities.” And Article 23 of China’s Standardization Law makes the national security nexus of standards work clear: “The State shall promote standards that encourage civil-military integration and … promote the use of advanced and appropriate civilian standards in the development of national defense and the military.”