The U.S. is winning by a lot.
Mossoff et al. 21 – Professor of Law at George Mason University, J.D. from the University of Chicago; Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, PhD and LLM in Law from the European University Institute.
Adam Mossoff, Urška Petrovčič, Thomas J. Duesterberg, and Harold Furchtgott-Roth, “Comment on National Institute of Standards and Technology Study on China's Involvement in Standard Development Organizations,” The Hudson Institute, 12-07-2021, https://www.hudson.org/technology/comment-on-national-institute-of-standards-and-technology-study-on-china-s-involvement-in-standard-development-organizations
Although China has clearly strengthened its role in the global standardization ecosystem, it is not the technological leader, despite claims to the contrary. This is best illustrated with 5G, where Huawei is often proclaimed to be the global winner of the 5G race. 4 It is undeniable that Huawei is one of the leading contributors to 5G technological innovation. But the “world leader” status bestowed on it is a byproduct of an overly simplistic and unreliable methodology.
Commentators have been making a profound error when identifying Huawei as the winner of the 5G race: they are relying on simple counts of the total number of patents for measuring 5G leadership. 5 But there are important limitations in using patent counting as a measure of innovative output, as economists and statisticians have long recognized.6 The fundamental flaw in this method is that it assumes that all patents have equal value. However, numerous empirical studies have shown that the value of patents varies enormously,7 and simply counting the number of patents fails to account for this heterogeneity.
Several recent studies have confirmed that despite China’s progress, Western countries maintain their technological leadership in standardized technologies. 8 Yet, it is clear that China is closing the gap and it is a serious contender in key technological areas. That is why the U.S. must take the necessary steps to ensure that U.S. companies continue to be world leaders in the creation of next-generation technologies and can participate in fair and open standardization processes in SDOs that do not benefit any specific country’s industrial policies or specific company’s commercial interests.