Should technical standards decided and published by official Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and referred to in Regulations, Directives or, generally, in EU law be regarded as “law” that must be accessible to the public, or could these standards still be private goods, licensed for royalties and, indeed, only accessible by a few? Access to technical standards may be the next hot topic for the European Standard Setting Organisations (SSOs) and the EU Commission. Some SSOs, as a way to finance their activities to develop technical standards, may charge firms or third persons to access and make use of the technical standards produced.

When a consumer shops for a new smartphone, she will likely check whether different models implement a range of common standards such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 4G (soon 5G). Likewise, the typical consumer knows that when she switches from a phone that is charged using a microUSB connector to one that uses Apple’s “Lightning” connector or the more recent USB-C connector, she will need to replace her charging cables as well. Most consumers have only the vaguest notion of how the standards behind these technologies work. Nevertheless, consumers are familiar with the functionality associated with these simple trade names. The names of technical standards thus fulfill a critical informational role for consumers.

Increased international standardization by the private sector results from an ever-increasing demand of consumers for better and safer products, technological advances, the expansion of global trade and the ever-increasing focus on social and sustainability issues. International standards affect our everyday life in multiple ways. Standards bring about and solidify technological evolution, innovation and diffusion of knowledge. In that respect, they have an important impact on consumer wellbeing. They play a decisive role as to whether the business and market environment will be conducive to increased innovation and trade. They form an important condition for doing business and affect access to markets, determining the profitability, growth and ultimately the survival of entrepreneurs and economic operators alike. Hence, standards have a crucial trade facilitation function.

Standardization is typically cast in technocratic language. Beneath the technical veneer, however, there is politics. While the development of standards brings about opportunities for innovation and market access for some firms, for others it entails significant switching costs. Product specifications may need to be changed, production processes and methods may require amendment or the manufacture of certain products might need to be abandoned completely. With so much at stake, there are strong incentives to influence standards development.

In 1938 Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the creators of the Superman comic book character, sold their copyright to the predecessor of DC Comics for $130. Siegel and Shuster died in the 1990s, virtually penniless, while Superman earned heroic sums for his corporate owners over many decades. Similar scenarios have arisen for literary authors, songwriters, and visual artists. In each case, young and unknown creators, eager to secure their first commercial contract, sell their rights in important early works to a publisher or record label for a pittance, and are then unable to profit from the work’s later success.

Throughout this volume, commentators agree that technical interoperability standards are essential to the operation of the Internet, the World Wide Web, cellular networks, and, indeed, to the modern information society. They are an integral part of the largely invisible infrastructure of the modern world that makes things work, including the rapidly expanding Internet of Things. With the rise of the global economy, copyright has become a prominent factor in the longstanding debate over intellectual property rights in standards, as standards developing organizations (SDOs) typically claim copyright protection to charge substantial fees for access to and rights to use their standards.

As noted in the Introduction to the companion volume, technical interoperability standards are ubiquitous in the modern networked economy. They enable products made and sold by different vendors to interact with little to no consumer intervention. They allow new market entrants, small and large, to innovate on top of established technology platforms, bringing technological advances to all corners of the globe. They expand consumer choice, eliminate duplicative development efforts, and accelerate product and feature design. Standards have enabled connected systems for more than a century, beginning with railroad tracks and telegraph lines and today forming essential elements of the modern communications, computing, manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation industries.

“Open standards” is a fluid term encompassing those standards which are available to be employed to develop multiple implementations compatible with the standard. No single definition can encompass what makes up an open standard, although there are many consistencies between experts, scholars, and lawmakers in their attempts to define the term. The main reasons behind governments adopting open standards are to reduce costs by preventing vendor lock-in and promoting interoperability between different implementations and technologies. However, achieving interoperability between multiple independent implementations that are compliant with a particular standard remains a significant challenge.