The Expanding Role And Importance Of Standards In The Information And Communications Technology Industry

Standards play a particularly critical role in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry: they facilitate important interoperability goals. Standards development processes in the ICT industry are extraordinarily complex, and many aspects of these processes are not well understood. Inspired by discussions at a workshop that included leading practitioners, academics, and policymakers specializing in standards, the authors identify factors that explain both the growing importance and the growing complexity of standards in the ICT industry. The authors provide a framework for understanding how standards development efforts are structured, with a particular focus on the more informal specification development groups known as Consortia. The authors also explore two particular challenges in standard setting: the development of intellectual property policies that adequately balance different stake-holder interests, and the potential for ethical conflict issues.