The Politics of Standards
Standards are technical documents drafted by engineers and discussed in committees before being implemented in code. However, to discuss them only in technical terms would be to overlook an essential aspect of their nature and function.
In fact, standards are also – and above all – political tools because they define market players, determine the direction of development, and establish the interests served by the ecosystem. In other words, they underpin the market’s power relations.
What a standard does
A standard is a coordination mechanism that allows multiple independent parties, such as software developers, hardware manufacturers, content creators, governments and businesses, to collaborate without having to negotiate the terms of their interaction every time.
Like a language, a standard enables communication with everyone who speaks it. It is an immensely valuable promise of universal communication, which is why standards are so important in computing, where the network effects of compatibility multiply rapidly.
However, a standard also defines the conditions for participation.
A simple, transparent standard based on widely available knowledge can be implemented by multiple parties without creating inequality.
In contrast, a complex, deliberately obscure standard that requires specific expertise can only be implemented correctly by those who defined it, creating inequality.
Therefore, the complexity of a standard acts as a barrier, determining who can access the market and the balance of power within it.
Open ecosystems
An open ecosystem does not depend on a document containing the specifications of the standard, but rather on any stakeholder’s ability to implement the standard fully and correctly in accordance with the specifications, without resorting to undocumented behaviour or reverse engineering.
This requires the specifications to be written clearly, to allow for only one interpretation, and for the standard not to depend on behaviours defined by the reference implementation, which would make the latter a mandatory dependency. It also requires the standard to be stable enough to prevent compliant implementations from becoming obsolete due to silent revisions.
When all these conditions are met, the standard can be implemented by anyone, even those who played no part in its creation. Universities, small businesses, open-source communities, government agencies, and individual developers can all produce compliant software.
Competition is possible based on the quality of the implementation rather than proximity to the standard’s authors or reverse engineering. The standard provides a foundation upon which anyone can build.
Closed ecosystems
While the closure of an ecosystem through a standard may be accidental, it is usually intentional and based on a series of fairly easy-to-list mechanisms.
The first mechanism is unnecessary complexity. When a standard defines its own solutions to problems that already have valid, widely implemented solutions, it forces other players to reinvent the wheel. Every proprietary subsystem is a new element that increases costs and often artificially limits compatibility.
The second mechanism is underdetermination. When specifications are ambiguous or limited, different implementations produce different results. When a document is displayed slightly differently, users always blame the second application rather than the format. This is an extremely insidious form of lock-in.
The third mechanism is extensibility. If the specifications permit the addition of proprietary extensions, the document is technically compliant with the standard, but only one programme can display it correctly. In this case, the standard merely covers a proprietary system.
In addition to these three mechanisms, there is direct or indirect influence over standardisation bodies. Direct influence occurs when the vendor can influence the standardisation process itself, shaping the compliance requirements to match the behaviour of their own application. Indirect influence occurs when the vendor can influence other members through factors external to the standardisation process.
The stakes beyond software
The consequences of open and closed standards affect more than just software developers.
For example, a government that archives its documents in a format that can only be handled correctly by a specific piece of software is, in effect, dependent on the vendor that developed it. This means that the long-term preservation of public documents is subject to the commercial decisions of a private company.
Cultural institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, face the same problem over longer timescales. An open, standardised format is more likely to remain readable over time than a proprietary format whose continued support depends on the strategic priorities of a single supplier.
For developing economies and public-interest organisations with limited resources, open standards provide a vital infrastructure that ensures equal access.
Reading the technical as political
When evaluating a standard, technical details become political.
Using #RRGGBB for colours rather than a proprietary system is not an aesthetic choice; it affects who can implement the format and who benefits from the ecosystem it creates.
Adopting the ISO 8601 standard for dates rather than a serial system inherited from a single piece of proprietary software based on a fifty-year-old bug is choosing interoperability over continuity with a proprietary past.
These choices add up.
A standard that consistently aligns with open and established practices rather than proprietary reinvention on the basis of multiple decisions of this kind is fundamentally different from a proprietary format that constantly does the opposite, even though both produce documents that appear identical on screen and both bear the label ‘open standard’. This label means very little.
What matters is whether independent implementers can develop fully compliant software and whether the ecosystem is genuinely accessible to all who wish to participate. Ultimately, the standard must serve the interests of users rather than the company that defined it.
These are political issues which deserve to be discussed as such.
