Having been peripherally involved in some standards processes (ISO, ETSI, and others), and knowing some people in the 3GPP circus, this reads a lot like someone who hasn't been on the sausage factory tour.

The standardisation processes I've seen are intensely political processes, where companies manoeuvre for competitive advantage, typically by getting their patents or market dominating technology baked in, more or less subtly. And you get what you want by throwing money at the process - it buys you the best subject matter experts, it pays for them to attend interminable meetings in far flung places, it provides a back-room support team, it pays for scatter-gun patents for anything that might be relevant, etc.

This all means that standardisation processes can be 'captured' by the big players, who then cross-license the patents to each other for little or no cost and everyone else, who don't have any IP to trade, has to pay the licenses.
posted by Luddite at 1:02 PM on May 1 [22 favorites]

This was not written by people involved in industrial standards. The authors have worked at NISO, who created the DOI publishing standard— they are academics doing academic standards stuff. I don’t have a good understanding of NISO but nothing the authors wrote rings true to me as someone who works on industrial standards.

ANSI’s definition of “openness” is not a normal definition of openness.

Standards development organizations (SDOs) erect barriers to participation through time-intensive and resource-intensive processes, such as requiring in-person testimony for proposed changes to standards. They also use arcane procedures that make it difficult for anyone who isn’t a long-time participant to even file a change petition.

Who can afford to bring in consultants to write a proposal and prepare testimony? Who can bring 2-3 subject matter experts to a public hearing so they can sit around for two to four days waiting to be called? Those are the people for whom standards are “open.”
posted by Headfullofair at 1:09 PM on May 1 [11 favorites]

They wrote a book called Standards, apparently.
posted by Headfullofair at 1:12 PM on May 1 [3 favorites]

If you’re looking to understand the growth and development of standards that govern buildings, I recommend reading Aleksandra Jaeschke’s Greening of America’s Building Codes. It gives an excellent picture of the purposes, structures, and market functions of standards.
posted by Headfullofair at 1:19 PM on May 1 [2 favorites]

> this reads a lot like someone who hasn't been on the sausage factory tour.

correct. every time i think about web standards organizations i think about that one adam smith quote, you know, the one that goes:

people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public

everyone who read that in leonard nimoy’s voice, raise your hand

> standards development organizations (sdos) erect barriers to participation through time-intensive and resource-intensive processes, such as requiring in-person testimony for proposed changes to standards. they also use arcane procedures that make it difficult for anyone who isn’t a long-time participant to even file a change petition.

and/or they charge hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a seat at the table. do you want to know why javascript ecmascript and by extension the whole web is so awful? it’s so awful because the only organizations with a meaningful say in how the language is specified are google, apple, and mozilla (i.e. google’s well-trained well-housebroken pet nonprofit).

oh wait that’s not fair: a number of cryptocurrency firms also have seats at the table

doing research on web standards orgs is useful and enlightening but it’s also a way to make one’s skin crawl all the way off one’s body.

> standards development organizations (sdos) erect barriers to participation

another barrier to entry used by many web standards orgs is they’re largely governed by people who have seen neither the inside of a therapist’s office nor the inside of a shower, despite having dire needs for both.

n.b. the moment at which free software was rebranded as “open source” was the moment that whatever political impact it could have hypothetically had was drained and then replaced with the evil zombie juice that has powered corporate software standards rackets consortia since the mid-20^th century
posted by Sperry Topsider at 1:41 PM on May 1 [10 favorites]

I've just retired after working in tech (programmer, chip designer, etc) for all my life (and yes been on some of those standards committees, but not played any of the patent games).

I honestly think that the whole patent system is broken (and I have 20+, mostly all expired) the big test is "obviousness" - a patent shouldn't be obvious to a practitioner in the field, so many stupid patents do meet this test, I've spent so much time avoiding the obvious solution to a problem because someone has patented it and we couldn't afford the lawyers if we used all the obvious solutions, building more expensive and complicated systems instead.

I've always thought that any patent should pass this test: you shouldn't be able to patent anything unless you would be proud to explain to Mr Edison (of your field). There's only a couple of my 20 patents that meet that criteria.

A big part of the problem is that patent examiners (and patent attorneys) are not "practitioners in the field" and therefore not capable of detecting obviousness. Any patent examiner with the appropriate knowledge to evaluate my patents could be paid twice as much working in the field.

Still I see hope on the horizon, China has a wonderful lack of respect for IP, it's one of the main reasons why they can innovate so fast compared to the West, and why Chinese markets have products you'd never see here, the West is going to need to change if they want to compete
posted by mbo at 2:19 PM on May 1 [3 favorites]

i never expected the chinese communist party to be by comparison to their peer organizations the relative good guys of the 21^st century, but, well, here we are.

okay that’s not fair. canada, the e.u., and parts of latin america have not yet fallen
posted by Sperry Topsider at 2:30 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]

Yeah, this article is a little... weird. Like, sure, USB was developed by an industry consortium, but the fact that it became a widespread charging standard-- to the point that we no longer expect new devices to ship with their own charger, a detail that would have been unthinkable a decade ago-- was not due to the industry's foresight, but because the European Union passed regulations that required it. If not for that, you'd still be sifting through drawers for the right device-specific wall wart.

If you want an example of what industries do without external regulation, take a look at power tool battery packs. They're pretty much the same cells internally, but are designed not to interoperate. The chargers are deliberately designed not to do proper trickle charging to encourage you to buy new batteries when the voltage drops too low. The situation is so stupid and wasteful that the idea of the government stepping in and regulating the industry is a hopeful recurring april fool's joke.

tl;dr: talking about standardization without talking about the role of goverment regulation is just bizarre.
posted by phooky at 2:37 PM on May 1 [11 favorites]

When I read ISO 3728|IDF 70:2004, I don’t really feel like they’re fighting capitalism. And don’t get me started on the so-called “Alliance.” I’m looking at you, UK!
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 3:40 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]

*waves in metafliter*

Hey all. This is me, one of the authors of this piece. There's a fair amount of conflation going on in the comments, but very quickly:

A lot of these issues are covered in the book, unsurprisingly....regulatory mechanisms of political bodies that force issues (Brussels effect internationally, California effect here in the US), the degree to which "open" means "open", and the careful delineation between intellectual property systems (Patents et al) and standards processes as instantiated at the SDO level. It is also true that different areas of formal standards have very different amounts of capitalistic pressures on them - technology standards have different players than industrial standards which have different players than safety or health standards which have different players than academic publishing standards.

With all of that in mind, the underlying philosophy and process of "making standards" across all of those realms have commonalities that are not a part of other similar processes for creating of guidance in the world. These processes are different than lawmaking and other mechanisms of regulation.

Sadly, there's only so much of an argument one can make in 1200 words. :-) I worked in standards for 5 years, at the NISO, ANSI, and ISO levels, including being on a couple of very large ISO technical standards groups...we're not ignorant of all of these issues, they are just commented on/discussed in the book.
posted by griffey at 4:38 PM on May 1 [12 favorites]

everyone who read that in leonard nimoy’s voice, raise your hand

Right here!
posted by Navelgazer at 5:42 PM on May 1

NISO sold library patron privacy to vendors, techbros, and Big Surveillance. Librarians stopped this venal weaseling when it was RA21, but now it's SeamlessAccess and we've sadly failed.

NISO also played dog-in-manger with MARC, the creaky aging library-catalog standard that should have been put out to pasture a couple decades ago at least. Don't even TRY to argue with me about this one; I was on the appropriate committee when BIBFRAME was starting to happen, and downright stunned the odious Todd Carpenter when I said (paraphrased) "stop blocking BIBFRAME just because NISO wants to be BMOC." I quit the committee soon after, because I cannot stand quislings and influence-peddlers.

One of the best things libraries could do right now (under siege as we are) to conserve a little cash is stop supporting NISO in any way whatever.
posted by humbug at 5:45 PM on May 1

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