It will determine who is the technological leader.

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/

And yet, the United States, European Union, and China have each identified standards development as critical to strategically important technologies. The White House issued a “National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology” in May 2023 that affirms the importance of standards and calls for “[b]olstering U.S. engagement in standards for critical and emerging technology spaces ….”1 In 2022, the European Commission published a standards strategy that called for strengthening the global role of European standardization because “the strategic importance of standards has not been adequately recognized at the cost of EU leadership in standards-setting.”2 The U.S. and EU strategies follow on China’s 2021 outline plan to improve standards development and increase incorporation of international standards because they are “an important aspect of the country’s foundational systems.”3

These parallel initiatives recognize how much technical standards and the organizations that develop them can shape 21st century information society. Across industries, technologies, and countries, standards help enhance safety, improve management practices, and enable interoperability for businesses and consumers. They also can provide coherent frameworks by which products and services comply with a given law. In the digital arena, standards permit different systems to communicate and share data with one another reliably, reduce the costs of the communication and data exchange, and provide more secure and resilient data storage and transmission.

A familiar example of such standards is IEEE 802.11, which enables seamless Wi-Fi connections as the bandwidth of routers expands and devices move about.4 In addition to using Wi-Fi, consumer smart phones rely on a host of hardware and software standards, such as ISO/IEC 14496 (ITU H.264) and ISO/IEC 23008 (ITU H.265)5 for media playback; IETF ICE for FaceTime;6 and specifications from Bluetooth SIG,7 and defense against liquid and dust under IEC 60529 (ingress protection ratings).8 (I did mention alphabet soups and number salads). These are just some of the many standards that enable the connections and devices bundled into mobile phones and many other connected devices. “God is in the details,” said the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and, in today’s technology-driven societies, standards drive the details.

As the world grapples with the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, mastering the details will be necessary for understanding the implications of these technologies and managing those implications in policy and application. So it makes sense for governments to sharpen their focus on standards and standards development as they address the economic, social, and geopolitical impact of technology policy and development. Yet government attention also has the potential to undermine attributes that are fundamental to the effectiveness of standards and the processes by which they are developed. This working paper examines how governments can work to strengthen international standards commensurate with the importance of standards for emerging technologies while sustaining the independent, collaborative, and research-driven role of standards development organizations (SDOs) and broadening their participation and transparency.