7 Standards
The setting ofglobal standards may seem like an arcane field. But when it comes to standards for frontier technology, it is also a field of intense geopolitical rivalry that entangles firms as well as governments. A recent White House (2023, 3) strategy document starkly sets out the significance ofstandards setting for the United States:
Strength in standards development has been instrumental to the United States’ global technological leadership . . . Today, however, the United States faces challenges to its longstanding standards leadership, and to the core principles of international standard-setting that, together with likeminded partners, we have upheld for decades. Strategic competitors are actively seeking to influence international standards development, particularly for [critical emerging technologies], to advance their military-industrial policies and autocratic objectives.
Technical standards are of unique significance in platform competition, because standards underpin the compatibility and integration of hardware, software, and services across layers of the technology stack (Bergsen et al., 2022). Control of standards consequently allows platform firms to orchestrate greater control over market structures and industrial ecosystems, enhancing their infrastructural power.
The United States has been able to define the standards that govern the internet and make its transnational expansion possible. Its power over internet standards got off to an inauspicious start. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, a young Stanford professor and an ARPA engineer who had worked on aspects of the ARPANET, locked themselves in a hotel conference room in the summer of 1973 and wrote the protocols for TCP/IP – the packet switching rules which continue to enable networking to this day (Levine, 2018). Initially designed for military purposes, Cerf, Kahn and ARPA’s success in interconnecting networks eventually spawned the civilian internet. As its creation began to take off, ARPA established the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a private body ofsixteen researchers and engineers, to oversee and codify its burgeoning suite oftechnical standards for networking devices. As Yates and Murphy (2022, 10) write:
IETF’s process differed significantly from that of other private standards bodies; it had no membership (anyone could attend any meeting), no formal/voting, no required balance of stakeholders, no system for representing different parts of the world, and a famously raucous, argumentative style.
Today, the IETF remains the single most important standards-setting body ensuring interoperability in internet governance. But despite its reputation as an ‘open’ and meritocratic organization, US platform giants increasingly dominate proceedings: ‘[M]ost IETF participants are from large corporations and key proposals are concentrated into a small group of companies which sponsor individuals’ participation in the form of time and travel to annual meetings’ (Harcourt et al., 2020, 38). Other important bodies covering internet technology standards include industry-led fora like the W3C, 3GPP, and the IEEE, alongside intergovernmental bodies like the ISO/IEC and the ITU. A recent Atlantic Council study demonstrates that the United States retains overwhelming dominance across these various standards developing organizations (SDOs) (Neaher et al., 2021). And despite their reputation as industry-led and multistakeholder fora, US state agencies have long worked to ensure that US platform firms enjoy influence within SDOs. SDOs function as an important source of international political economic power as they create a smooth global playing field for US tech giants and encode their innovations as the standards upon which in global technology stacks operate (Hill, 2014; Powers and Jablonski, 2015).
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