Strong SDOs solve their internet impact better.
Wong-Ervin and Wright 16 – Director of the Global Antitrust Institute and Adjunct Professor of Law at George Mason University, J.D. from the University of California College of the Law; former Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, Professor of Law at George Mason University, PhD in Economics and J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Koren W. Wong-Ervin and Joshua Wright, “Intellectual Property and Standard Setting,” The Federalist Society Review, 12-05-2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2878955
“Standards enable virtually all the products we rely upon in modern society, including mechanical, electrical, information, telecommunications, and other systems, to interoperate.”1 Standards reside at the heart of, among other things, the mobile industry, allowing users to experience worldwide interoperability and interconnectivity across mobile devices. If the mobile industry lacked standards, you might enjoy your iPhone but be unable to call your friend on his Galaxy due to incompatible technology.
Standard setting has become increasingly important to the economy. Voluntary, open, and market driven standard setting promotes research and development investments in “best of generation” technologies that enable and accelerate follow-on innovation, competition, and economic growth. Standard development organizations (SDOs) are private organizations that develop technical and other standards through a collaborative and consensus-driven process that balances the varied interests of industry participants, which include both producers and potential users of technology. SDOs provide a platform for industry scientists and engineers to come together and develop technical standards. Because standards may include technology that is the subject of intellectual property rights (IPRs) such as patents, SDOs historically have promoted widespread dissemination of standardized technologies through IPR Policies, which balance the rights of IPR holders with rights to access essential technology. Although SDO IPR Policies vary widely, many policies achieve this balance by seeking to have their members publicly declare any potential standard-essential patents (SEPs) (i.e., patents that are essential to practice a given standard) and to license them on “fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory” (FRAND) terms.2 Most SDOs clearly state that the purpose of the FRAND assurance is to both ensure access to the standardized technology and fairly compensate the contributors to the standard.3