This is the first of ten pieces which follow on from the initial overview of this subject.

International standardisation has a problem: many people outside the process (and even a few inside it) do not understand, at a basic level, what it is. Defining “standardisation” is easy enough – standardisation is essentially just agreeing on a specification; the far trickier concept is “international”. Let us look at some things which do not define international standardisation:

• It does not mean that people from many nationalities are involved
• It does not mean that particular problems of localisation are particularly attended to
• It does not mean the standard has a good chance of applying anywhere on the planet

Of course all of these things can be, and nearly always are, characteristics of International standardisation; but they do not define it. No, what defines international standardisation is that the agreements made are, literally, inter-national – or, in other words, between nations. Not between individuals, or lobby groups, or movements, or government departments, or corporations – but nations. This is the defining characteristic of international standardisation.

It is a respect for this international essence which will guide much of what follows in these pieces. It accounts for the complexity of the process, and it explains its value. The international aspect is, I argue, the guiding principle on which the mechanisms of JTC 1 should be built, and by which the activities of JTC 1 should be judged.

Has International Standardisation a Future?

Some have argued that International Standardisation is not relevant to the modern world, and particularly to the modern world of ICT standardisation. Bob Sutor (VP of Standards, IBM) has written a number of weblog entries reacting to the 2008 standardisation of ICO/IEC 29500. He speculates thus:

[W]hile [ISO and IEC have] created thousands of standards for safety, mining, agriculture, and other areas, perhaps people are now shifting away from thinking that these groups should have anything to do with IT and interoperability standards. […] With the actions of the ISO and IEC, I think people have every reason to think that way. I feel that way.

And suggests,

I think people need to remember that important, and sometimes more important, standards work is taking place in standards groups like the W3C, OASIS, IEEE, OMG, and the OAGI. That is, in my opinion, the ultimate stamp of quality and acceptance need not be from the ISO or one of the other I** organizations.

Is Sutor’s feeling (or the feelings of the “people” he mentions) justified? Are ISO and IEC ICT standards irrelevant today as compared to those from vendor consortia like those Sutor mentions? Against this, the JTC 1 Directives themselves assert some benefits of international standardisation

International Standards (IS) issued by JTC 1 are considered the most authoritative standards on IT. […] ISs […] are recognised throughout the world, and in many countries constitute the technical regulatory basis for public procurement of IT goods and services. The transposition of a specification into an IS […] makes it eligible for such procurement, and hence widens the market recognition of such a specification.

The argument is however rather smug and circular, and amounts to “international standards are authoritative and that leads to their market impact; this impact makes them authoritative”. Starting from fundamentals, five more convincing arguments may, I think, be made.

1. Diversity as a Hedge

The principal alternative to having a strictly international organisation set ICT standards is to have a vendor-led consortium doing it. Whatever the relative merits of International vs. consortia standards, I would argue it is risky to argue for a world in which International standardisation has ceased to exist and we only have one type of standards body.

Over the last decade we have witnessed movement of experts back and forth between the consortium and International Standards world. It is presumptuous to declare standards could only be made one way, and to construct a world around that presumption. Those who argue against international standardisation itself are in effect declaring they are so sure of its worthlessness that it must be actively eliminated, presumably by dismantling the national standards bodies of all nations and dissolving the international standards frameworks in which they participate, including ISO, IEC, the UN bodies, and ITU-T.

2. Stability

Standards consortia are essentially commercially-based entities relying for their continued existence on the membership fees of their (mainly commercial) members. As such they are subject to the vagaries of the market and the collective whim of their membership. In recent years the market conditions in which consortia exist have become more difficult, and there is every reason to believe, with the recent difficulties in the global economy, that this situation will not improve. Indeed recent events have rather served to demonstrate that the apparently mightiest commercial entities are vulnerable compared to governments – the true last resort of stability. We can have no confidence today in the continuing existence of any particular ICT consortium in the short, let alone the medium, term.

The de jure standards organisations have the rock-like backing of governments supporting national standards bodies. This is a necessary and appropriate stability, considering that these de jure bodies are responsible for the stewardship of over 17,000 published standards (in ISO). I have heard no convincing proposals for what might happen to these published standards if the de jure bodies were dismantled.

3. A voice for governments

There is much talk of the benefits of “openness” to the standards world today, yet ironically many of the proposed non-international alternatives to JTC 1 that have been proposed (usually based on vendor-led consortia) are, from the perspective of a national government, closed. How does it work if the country (the USA, say) wants a voice in a consortium body? What does it mean for vendors established in that nation if their view conflicts with “national policy”? The de jure bodies, with their – partly necessary – elaborate bureaucracy, are designed to channel and mediate such national positions effectively and provide an “open” forum for the expression of nations’ voices. Individuals and corporations may feel disenfranchised by this, but that rather misses the point … this is international standardisation.

4. Wider participation and dissemination

Another clear benefit of the international standardisation mechanisms is their sheer size. With 83 participating nations (in JTC 1), each with their own collections of committees, the number of experts that may be called on is impressive, many of them bring distinctive and valuable requirements and expertise to the table. The recent standardisation of ISO/IEC 29500, for example, drew on the expertise of well over a thousand contributors form a wide variety of nations. It is hard to imagine non-international structures ever achieving similar levels of concentration of thought power.

Standards that are made internationally also have greater reach through being transposed into national standards by participating nations and translated into the native language(s) if necessary.

5. A bulwark against corporatism

As was observed above, nations are one of the few types of entity that can be relied on to provide better stability than global corporations. By the same token, nations are the only entities left on this planet with sufficient power to resist any untoward behaviour on the part of those corporations; nations collectively can, and frequently do, arrive at conclusions which dismay corporations. With the voices of nations removed from standardisation, there would be no bar to complete corporate dominance of the standardisation space.

It is vital that governments are allowed to participate in standardisation, since governments have (or should have) a very different kind of compact with their citizens than corporations have with their consumers. The guiding principle of corporate activity is profit; governments are in a position to take a longer-term and socially informed view of national interest. It is we, the users of ICT standards, who have much to lose if this dimension becomes excluded from the ICT standards world.