April 2005
Vol IV, No. 4

CHINA

EDITOR'S NOTE:	CHINA, THE UNITED STATES, AND STANDARDS Print this article (PDF)
EDITORIAL:	CHINA
China is the most populous nation in the world, and the fastest growing economy on the globe. It also has vivid memories of historical oppression by foreign powers that are triggered when foreign patents are included in global standards. It’s in everyone’s best interests to welcome China into global standard setting circles, rather than encourage it to adopt protectionist standards of its own. Print this article (PDF)
FEATURE ARTICLE:	THE YIN AND YANG OF CHINA’S TRADE STRATEGY: DEPLOYING AN AGGRESSIVE STANDARDS STRATEGY UNDER THE WTO
China’s long march to accession to the WTO resulted in the loss of its ability to impose protectionist tariffs, and limited its ability to set domestic standards. In response, it has developed one of the most formidable standard setting infrastructures in the world, and is testing its new constraints under the WTO. Print this article (PDF)
TRENDS:	TOP DOWN OR BOTTOM UP? A TALE OF TWO STANDARDS SYSTEMS
China sets its standards strategy centrally, and staffs that strategy with thousands of government employees. In the United States, the government stands aside, and hundreds of standards organizations, manned by corporate employees and volunteers, churn out what they think the market needs. Which approach is “better?” Which country will prevail? Print this article (PDF)
STANDARDS BLOG:	SOCIAL STANDARDS, SCHOOL VIOLENCE AND TABOOS: IN RESPECT OF RED LAKE
Primitive societies knew enough to brand the unthinkable as unthinkable, to ensure that the unthinkable never happened. We do just the opposite. What right do we have to feel surprised by Red Lake? Print this article (PDF)
EVENTS:	LANDMARK MEETING OF ANSI AND CONSORTIUM LEADERS HELD IN BOSTON
For more than twenty-five years, the worlds of nationally accredited standards development organizations and global standard setting consortia have co-existed in the United States with only one-on-one liaison relationships. On March 29, a first-ever face-to-face meeting between ANSI and the consortium world was held in Boston.
NEWS SHORTS:	THIS MONTH'S TOP STORIES
The World Gets More Control of the Web; Medical Scientists Adopt Consortium Methods; Europe Continues to Consider Software Patents While More in the U.S. Call for Patent Reform; Armistice (Just in Time) in the War Over DVD Format; Wireless Scrambles Continue; IBM Adopts Open Source Development Internally; New Consortium to Attack Cybersecurity Threats; First Ever ANSI/Consortium Meeting is a Great Success; China Halts Brain Surgery on Drug Addicts Till Standards are Set [?], and, as always, much more

Print this issue (PDF)

---

EDITOR'S NOTE:

---

EDITORIAL

CHINA

Andrew Updegrove

“Third-class companies make products; second-class companies develop technology; first-class companies set standards.”
	Popular saying among Chinese business and government leaders
“China’s mobile telecom market will no longer be a playground for overseas companies in the coming 3G age”
	Zhang Guobao, Deputy Minister, PRC State Development Planning Commission

China: The concept of China defies modification in an editorial title. With a fifth of the world’s people and an exploding global share of both finished goods exports as well as raw material imports, the potential commercial influence of this vast nation can scarcely be underestimated.

But while China is emerging as a dominant commercial player on the world stage, it is more than mindful of the 150 years of political and trade exploitation it suffered at the hands of foreign powers. Those abuses of national sovereignty included the forcing of an odious drug trade on its people by the British and the French; its ultimate defeat at the hands of those same powers in the Opium Wars in 1839, after it tried to protect its citizen from exploitation; the loss of control of scores of so-called Treaty Ports such as Shanghai and Hong Kong; and the carving up of the entire country into multiple “Spheres of Influence,” within which the powers that claimed them asserted further indignities, including foreign legal jurisdiction and tariff control.

It is against this backdrop that China’s emergence as a great commercial power must be understood, as China’s attitude towards the perceived inequalities of today is informed and sensitized by the unquestioned abuses of the past.

Today, of course, there are no formal spheres of influence. But there are many international trade networks, conventions, treaties and practices that have evolved internationally in modern times, largely without Chinese involvement, due to the turmoil that it experienced throughout the last century. China must deal with these realities, many of which are less susceptible to its influence than the markets that it has come to control through its substantial cost of manufacturing advantages.

These realities include the dominant position of patent portfolios owned by global corporations based in the West, as well as a global standard setting infrastructure that is already firmly entrenched. While China’s rearmament plans garner more coverage in the popular press, it is worth examining each of these more pedestrian issues in greater detail, as they are more closely linked to China’s foreign policy than one might expect (on this, more below).

Turning first to standards: there are virtually no manufactured goods today that are not effectively regulated by standards compliance requirements. Those standards are set by the hundreds of accredited standards development organizations (SDOs), particularly in traditional manufacturing sectors, and the newer consortia that have sprung up in their hundreds in the information and communications technology (ICT) space. Much of the standards output of these organizations is approved by global standards bodies such as ISO, IEC and the ITU, and global treaties such as the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade relate to this output as well.

The implementation of thousands of these same standards necessarily infringes on patents. The vast majority of these patents are owned outside of China, and here is where current and historical frictions begin to converge.

This is because competitors based in the West and in Japan often cross-license their patents, lowering the effective costs of manufacturing (for example) consumer electronics. Since few Chinese companies today have patents that would be infringed by building products to international standards, these companies are forced to pay the full royalty burden on such devices – a cost that may exceed the available profit margin many times over. In a sense, foreign powers still enjoy spheres of influence over Chinese exports and internal consumption based upon intellectual property rights (IPR). The difference is that these product-based spheres of today are virtual and nationwide, rather than physical and regional.

Not surprisingly, these modern economic advantages are not appreciated in China, especially as they recall the more overt abuses of earlier times. So what is China to do?

Several strategies are available to it. They include ramping up China’s internal patent office, setting its own standards for goods sold domestically, and increasing its participation in the existing global standards setting infrastructure – and China is pursuing all of these strategies, as examined in greater detail in this month’s Feature Article.  And unlike the United States, the government of which has traditionally offered no economic support for domestic standard setting, China is investing heavily in the creation of domestic standard setting capabilities.

Consequently, while the U.S. government is associating little strategic importance to its own standard setting infrastructure at a time of net domestic manufacturing job losses, Beijing has elevated the same topic to a high priority in its efforts to accelerate the further transfer of manufacturing jobs from America to China. With the notable example of last year’s high-level agency involvement in the wireless Wi-Fi/WAPI standoff between the United States and China at the prodding of Intel, Texas Instruments and others U.S. companies are largely on their own. (see Breaking Down Trade Barriers: Avoiding the China Syndrome )

Can the United States government ignore China’s determined standards strategy? We think not. The reasons are not only defensive, but also opportunistic. Defensively, because U.S. industry can hardly afford to be at a further disadvantage in selling its wares to millions of increasingly affluent Chinese middle class consumers. But also opportunistically, because the more China becomes assimilated into cooperative global commerce, the less attractive to Beijing will military adventures across the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere appear to be.

To date, the United States has been closely monitoring China with respect to any effort by China to employ standards as barriers to trade. This is not the same, however, as encouraging China to participate in global, consensus-based standards setting, and may exacerbate the situation in the long term, even if it provides relief to American exporters in the near term.

What can be gained from such encouragement? In a classic scene in the brilliant but mordant 1976 cinema satire Network, global conglomerate CEO Arthur Jensen famously intones to the increasingly unstable Howard Beale:

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon - those are the nations of the world today.… The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit.

One would hardly wish to live in a world as cold and sterile as this. But if we are, after all, to live increasingly in a commercial world dominated not only by IBM and Dupont, but also by Wal-Mart and China’s Lenovo Group (which recently purchased IBM’s ThinkPad laptop line), we should harness at least that part of Arthur Jensen’s vision that could lead to greater world stability.

In this sense, the decisions that China makes regarding its standards policy will be a bellwether for its broader commercial strategies. Will China look beyond its borders, and become a full participant in the global standards setting infrastructure? Or will it conclude that its best interests lie in wrapping itself in the enormous power of its domestic manufacturing and consumption potential, presenting ultimata to the world instead?

China’s eventual settled policies remain to be seen, but certainly they will be influenced by whether the West demonstrates understanding to issues such as China’s IPR disadvantages, or is seen in Beijing to be seeking once again to establish commercial, patent-based spheres of influence at its expense.

The lessons, then, are two-fold. First, the United States needs to incorporate a more pervasive awareness of standards into its international strategies. But its goal should not be to become more influential than China in setting future product standards. Rather, it should seek a leveling of the global standards playing field that will encourage China to become more assimilated into global commerce and less protectionist in its own standards strategy. The long-term result will be not only the opening of an increasingly affluent Chinese marketplace to western goods, but reduced tensions with the most credible contender to become the world’s next superpower as well.

Comments? Email:

Copyright 2005 Andrew Updegrove

---

FEATURE ARTICLE

THE YIN AND YANG OF CHINA’S TRADE STRATEGY:

DEPLOYING AN AGGRESSIVE STANDARDS STRATEGY UNDER THE WTO

Andrew Updegrove

Abstract: Since the decision of Deng Xiaoping to subject his country’s future to the effect of economic market forces, the Peoples Republic of China has made deliberate – and successful -- efforts to become a force to be reckoned with on the global commercial stage. As part of that strategy, China embarked on an ultimately successful 15-year quest to be admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), thereby becoming bound by the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). At the same time, China devised a sophisticated strategy to incorporate standard setting and compliance requirements into its economic strategy, and has invested significant resources in creating an infrastructure to support these activities. This strategy provides China with an alternative tool to replace the high tariffs barred by the WTO in order to convey advantages to its domestic industry in key areas of technology, especially where foreign standards requiring the payment of significant patent royalties would otherwise place it at a competitive disadvantage. However, the deployment of this strategy at times has tested the boundaries established by the TBT, leading to vigorous objections from Multinational Corporations and the governments of the nations where they are headquartered. This article reviews China’s efforts to become an equal partner in the global trade community, and the development in that context of its standards strategy, the infrastructure that supports it, and the status of those “home grown” standards that China is currently promoting in competition with correlative standards developed elsewhere in the world.

Introduction: After 150 years of commercial (and sometimes political) domination by foreign interests, China’s government passed into communist control in 1949. For the next three decades, the nation largely withdrew into itself. After deciding to reengage with other nations on a broad scale, China has now become the most rapidly growing economy in the world. With the combination of a vast pool of cheap labor, newly granted individual freedoms to launch commercial ventures, and continuing strong central government control, China has trade advantages that more developed nations are understandably viewing with concern.

One capability that central control and the adoption of five year plans has made available to China is the ability to rapidly conceive and execute a deliberate, coordinated and high priority standards strategy to provide advantages to domestic manufacturers. While the United States government continues to exhibit a laissez-faire attitude with regards to the creation and adoption of standards by its own industries, China has opted to follow the lead of the European Union in integrating standards (both generally and in specific cases) into its domestic and international trade strategy.

The decision to focus on standards evolved contemporaneously with China’s final negotiations directed at earning admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). With its eventual accession to the WTO, China became subject to that organization’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and increasing international pressure to conform to international treaties relating to the protection of patent, copyright and other intellectual property rights (IPR) conventions.

With these new restrictions in place, China has increasingly found itself balanced between huge trade opportunities as well as difficult economic restrictions based upon the dominance of other countries in the standard setting arena, as well as the enormous patent portfolios amassed by multinational corporations (MNCs) in core product opportunity areas such as consumer electronics, telecommunications and computer equipment.

As a result of these restrictions, China has aggressively moved to create its own standards in areas such as semiconductors and wireless telecommunications, where its needs are greatest and its preexisting patent positions are weakest. In doing so, it has carefully chosen which treaties it will decline to sign (such as those relating to government software procurement), and has pushed the envelope of compliance with others. These efforts have already resulted in more than one intervention by other nations at the highest levels of diplomacy, when MNCs have felt themselves to be at the greatest disadvantage.

Whether China will become a skillful player within global standards bodies and opt to compete solely at that level, or will primarily pursue internal standard setting initiatives that take advantage of its massive purchasing power, will be determined over the next several years. This decision will play out across the backdrop of the WTO and the dispute resolution mechanisms provided under its charter, as well as through more direct diplomatic channels and within the processes of both accredited standards development organizations (SDOs) and consortia.

This article will briefly review the relevant historical events leading up to China’s current status as a member of the WTO and the architect of a robust domestic standard setting infrastructure, as well as the elements of that infrastructure and the standards that China has recently created to challenge those developed elsewhere.

A new Long March: The commercial, educational and social disruption caused by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was followed by a long rebuilding of China’s academic and productive capacity. With the increasing integration of China into global commerce, China faced the decision of whether to maintain high domestic tariffs to protect domestic interests, or to seek acceptance into the trade treaty networks that facilitate free trade and provide a mechanism for resolving international disputes.

In 1986, China opted for the latter course, and began the long process of seeking admission to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). A protracted process of negotiations with treaty nations (sometimes overtaken and interrupted by political events) culminated eventually with China’s accession in December of 2001 to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which had replaced GATT on January 1, 1995.1

With its newfound status as a WTO member, China became subject to a variety of obligations, including those set forth in the TBT, which prohibits the use of standards and compliance testing regulations to erect technical barriers to trade. These rules prohibit (for example) the creation of standards that unfairly benefit domestic manufacturers and the imposition of requirements that foreign goods be subjected to burdensome and unnecessary compliance testing or tariffs.

Having achieved its goal of WTO accession after a 15-year quest, China embarked upon a path of both complying with, as well as testing the limits, of its new WTO obligations and constraints – particularly in the area of standards. In doing so, it is hardly acting in a way different than other countries, such as the United States, which was subject to a ruling on November 10, 2003 in the WTO that steel tariffs imposed by the United States to protect domestic steel mills violated WTO regulations.2

But China is operating under much closer scrutiny than other nations, as it must comply with a myriad of commitments that it made with a variety of nations as preconditions to their agreeing to its accession to the WTO. While in the main China’s efforts to remake its economy into one acceptable to its new WTO partners has been impressive, as recently as this year, the U.S. Trade Representative put China on notice that “[this] Administration will continue to be relentless in its efforts to ensure China’s full compliance with its WTO commitments….”3

Creating a Standards Infrastructure: As part of its efforts to both comply with WTO obligations as well as to optimize its competitiveness, China embarked upon a deliberate and systemic effort to create an educational, industrial and governmental infrastructure to support standards creation, implementation and compliance testing in support of domestic industry. In anticipation of its accession to the WTO, China created a new agency in April of 2001 through the merger of the existing State Administration for Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine and the State Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau. The new agency was named the Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ).

The AQSIQ, in turn, created the Standards Administration of China (SAC) and the China National Regulatory Commission for Certification and Accreditation (CNCA), both of which operate under its supervision. The AQSIQ also supervises the WTO TBT Inquiry Center, which operates as a liaison between China and the WTO.4

China also passed a variety of regulations intended to conform to the WTO and meet its commitments made to specific WTO members. These commitments include a promise to subject both domestic and foreign goods to the same compliance testing requirements. Consequently, China unified its compliance testing marks, creating a new “CCC” certification mark to supersede the former “CCIB” mark for imported products and “Great Wall” for domestic and imported products.

But China also embarked upon a far more aggressive infrastructural program than was required merely to comply with the requirements of the WTO and the TBT. Individual ministries, such as the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), were instructed to embrace a complex standards strategy as part of their core activities. The MII and numerous other ministries in turn deployed their personnel and other resources in support of the standards directives handed down from above.

The goals of China’s post-WTO accession edicts are many and varied, including achieving economic self-sufficiency for government research and development labs. But they are also intended to create a level intellectual property rights (IPR) upon which China can compete more equally with other countries. This objective was articulated by Zhang Qi, Director General of the Department of Electronics and IT (a part of MII) as follows: “Owning independent IPR and winning the initiatives in setting industrial standards should be top priorities for domestic .”5 The motivationfor such statements arises only partly from national pride. The greater goal being pursued is avoiding the payment of foreign patent royalties.

By the beginning of 2003, China had created 260 individual technical committees, each of which report to the SAC and can be directed to undertake specific standards projects by the government. 422 subcommittees were also in existence as of the same date. In all, some 27,800 technical specialists had been deployed by early 2003 to the creation of standards.

Finally, a number of industry associations have emerged (some at the instance of government agencies) at the local, regional and national level. These associations also play a role in the promotion of products based on homegrown Chinese standards.6

In a related effort, China has dramatically upgraded its patent infrastructure, with the result that the number of patents applied for by Chinese inventors has grown dramatically in the new millennium, with a total of 308,487 patent applications being received by the State Intellectual Property Office in 2003 (an increase of 22.1% from the prior year).7 More than one million Chinese patents were filed by domestic inventors in 2004. 8 Over time, this increasing patent portfolio will provide defensive as well as offensive tools, as Chinese manufacturers compete with MNCs.9

In, short, within a remarkably short period of time, China has constructed a formidable machine that it can deploy at will to pursue its strategic standards agenda.10

Opportunities and burdens: As China’s manufacturing capacity has rapidly increased and its enormous and low-cost labor supply has attracted customers such as Wal-Mart, the impact of standards-related issues for domestic manufacturers have multiplied, particularly in the technology area. Chief among them is the wealth of patents owned by non-Chinese companies that must be licensed to build a wide variety of products. As a result of the price advantage enjoyed by the owners of these patents, China is often reduced to the level of providing cheap labor in manufacturing facilities controlled by foreign nationals (often Taiwanese), rather than having the ability to build equivalent, higher margin products under its own brands.

Under how great a disadvantage does China suffer with respect to IPR? As of August of 2004, a global accounting firm estimated that a Chinese manufacturer was required to pay US $15 – 22 in patent royalties in order to build a DVD player with a retail value as low as $60.11 And in another report, it was estimated that a staggering 50 – 70% of the costs incurred by a Chinese company manufacturing a PC were allocable to IBM and Microsoft royalty payments instead.12

The result, not surprisingly, has been the development of a policy by China directed at enabling the building of products based upon standards that either do not infringe upon foreign patents, or which would in fact require foreign vendors to pay royalties to Chinese patent holders.

Such an effort would have been less constrained in pre-WTO times and in situations that did not involve technology products and services that rely upon global interoperability. But China has found that with its accession to the WTO generally, and in the area of technology in particular, the practical, treaty and technical difficulties presented by such a strategy are much greater.

One pre-WTO accession attempt to use a technology standard as a barrier to trade proved to be too heavy handed to succeed. That effort, in 1999, saw the creation of a standard by the State Encryption Management Commission (SEMC) requiring registration of all products with the State that included any encryption componen, however incidentalt. The practical (and intended) impact was to provide incentives to purchase more Chinese software, mobile phones, and other types of products.

The reaction from foreign vendors (and their governments) was predictable, vigorous, and ultimately successful. The scope of the SEMC standard was eventually narrowed to “only hardware and software for which encryption is a core function.”13

More recently, China once again used encryption concerns in an effort to advantage its domestic manufacturers. This time, the effort involved a wireless standard for laptop computer chips. In this case, the government contended (with some justification) that the then-current generation of Wi-Fi standards created by the IEEE did not provide adequate security protection. In response to this perceived deficit, the government announced that it would require that all products sold in China must comply with its own WLAN standard, which included what it regarded as superior security protection provided by the WAPI (Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) standard included in WLAN. Not coincidentally, addressing security concerns represents an exception under the TBT justifying the creation of a domestic standard rather than employing an available, globally acceptable standard.14

In employing a domestic standard rather than adopting Wi-Fi, Chinese manufacturers hoped to avoid the necessity of paying royalties to foreign patent holders. Moreover, foreign manufacturers would be required to make arrangements with the small number of Chinese manufacturers that had been granted patent licenses by the government to implement the standard in order to manufacture products in China that would comply with the WLAN standard.

Once again, the international hue and cry was great, led in particular by Intel and several other chip vendors, which announced that they would not sell wireless enabled chips into China at all. Eventually, through the intervention of Colin Powell and other senior United States trade officials, China announced that it would “indefinitely postpone” requiring compliance with the WLAN standard. 15

In part, the crisis was averted by both sides agreeing that China would pursue its concerns regarding the IEEE standard through the international standards process, and mutual statements were made on both sides announcing China’s anticipated cooperation. Though the story largely dropped out of the public press following these public statements, China’s efforts to address its original goals continued.

In 2005, relations have once again soured over this issue, with the Chinese delegation withdrawing from the ISO/IEC JTC/SC06/WG1 working group that is now considering wireless standards, after that group rejected a Chinese proposal to adopt the WAPI standard. In a written statement, the Chinese delegation alleged unspecified “unfair treatment” as the reason for its withdrawal. At a press briefing, a Chinese spokesperson alleged that “international monopoly forces” were blocking WAPI in order to promote the Wi-Fi standard for their own benefit.16

The perceived slight to the WAPI standard continues to rankle in China. For example, Shen Changxiang, a member of the State Informatization Advisory Committee and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was quoted on April 8, 2005 as follows: "In order to promote its own standard, the US has manipulated the International Standardization Organization [sic] (ISO) to block a Chinese standard through application procedures.”17

Current standards efforts: Standards-related issues are becoming, if anything, more urgent for China. Because it has largely leapfrogged the fixed-line based phase of telecommunications development, China has become the largest user (as well as the largest manufacturer, due to low labor costs) of cell phones in the world, with over 300 million currently in use. And, while some 35% of the world’s cell phones are manufactured in China, the vast majority of these products bear names such as Nokia.18 As with DVD players, the royalties payable to implement existing telecommunications standards can be prohibitive for manufacturers that do now own patents of their own that can be cross-licensed to offset royalties required by other patent owners.

Chinese manufacturers are anxious to avoid a repeat of this situation as new 3G (and eventually 4G) systems are deployed. The result is the creation of the TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) specification by China, which is in competition with a European-backed 3G standard, WCDMA (wideband CDMA) and a U.S. contender: CDMA 2000. Chinese manufacturers are particularly anxious that the homegrown standard be used domestically.

The high stakes surrounding Chinese standards decisions are well illustrated by the latest developments in the 3G standards competition. With billion of dollars at stake and the date for final licensing decisions by the Chinese government rapidly approaching, vendor end game moves have become increasingly frequent and dramatic: as of February 8, 2005, Asia Times reported that China Telecom and Netcom would bundle the technically compatible TD-SCMA and WCDMA, if technical trials of TD-SCMA did not go well. 19 More recently, the proponents of two competing European approaches reached an agreement to make their standards compatible to “help speed up China’ decision.”20 After the European companies reached détente, their U.S. vendor counterparts decided it was time to make common cause with China, and consider supporting TD-CDMA. 21

While a detailed discussion of China’s commitment to open source software is beyond the scope of this article, the Chinese government (which has always resented Microsoft’s dominance in software, even while it continues to turn a blind eye to rampant piracy of the same products) is also embracing open source software. Already, local vendors have launched such products, including the Red Flag Linux distribution. 22 China’s government has also sought to give advantage to the development of its domestic software industry by throwing its own vast procurement weight behind domestic open source and traditional software products. While this behavior has elicited protests by MCNs, it does not violate the letter of China’s WTO obligations, as China declined to become a party to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement. 23

The future: China has made admirable and impressive commercial progress in many respects, including the creation in record time of one of the most comprehensive standards infrastructures in the world. With the benefits of continuing central management, this intricate and vast network of technicians and supporting staff can be deployed to work on thousands of standards at a time.

But while creating such a structure is necessary to achieving China’s commercial goals, it is not sufficient in and of itself.

One limitation that China has already experienced is its own dependence on technology. During the Wi-Fi/WAPI controversy, the Chinese government was faced with the fact that it was itself highly dependent on Intel-powered laptops; an actual refusal by Intel to sell state of the art chips to wirelessly enable this equipment would have been at minimum inconvenient. Similarly, while Chinese telecommunications vendors are clamoring for China to require compliance with the TD-CDMA 3G standard, the nation can scarcely afford to build a communications network based on that standard unless it proves to enable robust performance in field tests.

Similarly, while compliance with the WTO TBT can be stretched by any nation to a degree, there are limits to how far China can go without overplaying its hand. In consequence, it is finding it necessary to learn how to participate more fully in global standards processes within organizations such as ISO and the IEC. To date, it has (perhaps not surprisingly) found the formal hierarchies of nationally accredited organizations operating under the global umbrella of the ISO, IEC, ITU and other de jure organizations to be more to its liking than the more dynamic consortia that are often dominated by MCNs. Still, as demonstrated by its withdrawal from the ISO working group noted above, successful participation in even such formal international technical groups is an art that China is still acquiring.

Summary: China has made remarkable progress in designing and implementing an extensive domestic standards infrastructure. With its continuing strong central control of many aspects of its national economy, it is well situated to deploy that infrastructure to its advantage.

Whether it will be successful in doing so, however, remains to be seen. Significant challenges to achieving its goals include:

It is likely that the future standards strategy of China will solidify in the next few years. Whether China will opt to truly integrate with the rest of the world of commerce and go toe to toe in the myriad standards bodies that already exist, or whether it will once more withdraw into its vast borders and adopt an isolationist standards policy leading to ongoing complaints within the WTO remains to be seen. That decision will be awaited with great interest by MNCs and governments throughout the world.

Comments? Email:

Copyright 2005 Andrew Updegrove

Appendices:

I. Chinese Standard Setting at a Glance

A. Selected Comparative Statistics:

Statistic	China	United States
Population (2004)	1,300,000,000	293,000,000
Economic Rank (2004)	6 th - $1.2 trillion	1 st - $10.2 trillion
Growth Rate (1990s)	10%	3.4%
PC Rank/Sales (2003)	2 nd - 13.3 million	1 st – 52.7 million

B. A Chinese Trade and Standards Timeline:

1949:		First standards body organized
1984:		First commodity inspection procedures instituted
July 1985:		Applies to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
June 1989:		Tiananmen Square crack-down; GATT negotiations cease
December 1989:		GATT negotiations resume
January 1995:		WTO formed; China fails to become founding member
April 2001:		Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) formed through merger of two predecessor agencies
December 2001:		Accession to the World Trade Organization
May 2002:		“CCC” certification mark adopted, superseding former “CCIB” mark for imported products and “Great Wall” for domestic and imported products
December 2003:		WAPI encryption standard becomes effective (compliance to be mandatory on June 1, 2004)
March 2004:		U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick send letter to Chinese Vice Premiers Wu Yi and Zeng Peiyan protesting WAPI standard requirement
April 2004:		China “indefinitely postpones” mandatory compliance with WAPI
February 2005:		Chinese delegation withdraws from ISO working group, protesting the rejection of a Chinese proposal to adopt WAPI

C. Administration

Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ): Oversees standards and certification activities for both foreign and domestic products; supervises SAC and CNCA and sets their budgets; also supervises WTO TBT Inquiry Center China National Regulatory Commission (CNRC): Administers the China Compulsory Certification (CCC) program, which tests product safety and technical conformity to standards Standards Administration of China (SAC): Sets and oversees national standards; sets annual standards agenda; represents China in the International Organizations for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) State Council: Oversees policy related activities of CNRC and SAC WTO TBT Inquiry Center: Acts as the formal liaison with the WTO, responding to WTO and WTO member inquiries, disseminating WTO information domestically, and informing the WTO of new PRC standards and procedures. Also trains AQSIQ employees.

D. Chinese Technology Standards Competing with International Standards:

Application	Chinese Standard	Competing Standard(s)
3G Wireless Phones	TD-SCMA	CDMA2000; WCDMA
Audio and Video compression	AVS	MPEG-4; H.264
Video Disc Players	EVD	HVD; HDV
Wireless (with Encryption)	WLAN/WAPI	Wi-Fi

II. Annotated Bibliography

The following resources were particularly useful in supplying the data included in this article:

"China's Accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO)." International Economics. January 2000. An exhaustive review of the history of the accession of the Peoples Republic of China to the World Trade Organization, the details of the accession process, and the specific commitments made by China to gain entry to the treaty.

“Monitoring China’s WTO Compliance: U.S. Government Reports, Hearings, and Other Resources on China’s WTO Compliance.” Congressional-Executive Commission on China Virtual Academy. This site aggregates key government information from the U.S. Trade Representative, including links to the full text of the Representative’s “Annual Reports to Congress on China’s WTO Compliance” and “National Trade Estimate Reports and Special 301 Reports on Intellectual Property Protection”; the text of Congressional hearings on China; and white papers and other relevant material from a variety of non-governmental sources. Of particular relevance are the Annual Reports to Congress.

Halverson, Karen . "China’s WTO Accession: Economic, Legal, and Political Implications." January 2004. This Article discusses the challenges that confronted China during WTO accession, and suggests that WTO accession has acted as a lever for economic and legal reform by locking in reform and making it irrevocable. [Note: footnotes appear at http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/lawreviews/meta-elements/journals/bciclr/27_2/06_FTN.htm]

Suttmeier, Richard P. and Yao, Xiangkui . "China's Post-WTO Technology Policy: Standards, Software, and the Changing Nature of Techno-Nationalism." May 2004. The authors explore China’s development of a new technology policy based on the promotion of its own technical standards “best understood in terms of a ‘neo-techno-nationalism’ in which technological development in support of national economic and security interests is pursued through leveraging the opportunities presented by globalization for national advantage.”

Updegrove, Andrew . "Breaking Down Trade Barriers: Avoiding the China Syndrome." The ConsortiumInfo.org Consortium Standards Bulletin, Vol. III, No. 5. May 2004. Reviews the context, development and resolution of the US-China face-off over the WAPI wireless encryption standard.

Weeks, Ann and Dennis Chen . "Navigating China's Standards Regime." China Business Review. May 2003. This article provides a detailed and practical overview of the internal organization and operation of China's standard setting infrastructure, as well as an in-depth assessment of the efficiency and fairness of this system in operation as of the date of its publication. Of particular interest is an enumeration of specific issues encountered by foreign vendors and the origins of these issues.

For much more material on the subject matter of this article and all other standards-related topics, see the ConsortiumInfo.org Standards MetaLibrary

III. Footnotes

1. For an analysis of China’s motivations for seeking accession to the WTO, see: Karen Halverson, "China’s WTP Accession: Economic, Legal and Political Implications," (January 2004).

2. For a critical review of United States conduct under the WTO, see: Stuart Anderson, “Unclean Hands: America’s Protectionist Policies,” Cato Institute

3. United States Trade Representative, 2004 Report to Congress on China’s WTO Compliance, p. 8

4. Ann Weeks and Dennis Chen, "Navigating China's Standards Regime," China Business Review (May-June 2003) (no pagination). For a ready reference to these agencies and their operations, see “Administration” under “Chinese Standard Setting at a Glance” at the end of this article.

5. China Daily , “Independent IPRs Vital to Tech Industry,” (February 11, 2003), no pagination

6. Weeks and Chen, "Navigating China's Standards Regime.”

7. State Intellectual Property Rights Office, “Report on the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in China 2003 (Abstract),” (April 13, 2004).

8. Carl Cargill, Director of Standards, Sun Microsystems, private communication based on MII information (April 29, 2005)

9. At the same time, China’s success at protecting foreign copyright and patent rights remains abysmal, with “counterfeiting and piracy rates…exceeding 90 percent for virtually every form of intellectual property.” United States Trade Representative, 2004 Report to Congress on China’s WTO Compliance, p. 5.

10. For a more lighthearted look at standards nationalism in Pacific Rim countries, see: Andrew Updegrove, “Soy Sauce, Kimchi and the Golden Rule,” The Standards Blog (October 18, 2004)

11. Deloitte, “Technology Firms Risk Losing Advantage as China’s Influence on Global Standards Reaches Critical Levels,” (August 4, 2004). Not surprisingly, China has created its owns video disk standard, called EVD, which was authorized for use in February of this year.

12. Sherman So, “Low-cost Chip Is Made for China,” South China Morning Post (February 17, 2004), <www.chinastudygroup.org>

13. The China Business Review, “Raising the Standard: China’s Rush to Develop Technology Standards (Part I),” (May-June 2003).

14. According to report prepared by the Patent Group of the American National Standards Institute, development of the WAPI standard was part of a systemic effort to revise international standards to avoid infringement of foreign patents, and require licensing of Chinese patents. See; Patent Group, American National Standards Institute (ANSI), “Intellectual Property Rights Policies in Standards development Organizations and the Impact on Trade Issues with the People’s Republic of China,” ANSI, (June 10, 2004), p. 5.

15. For a detailed review of the Wi-Fi/WAPI face-off, see: Andrew Updegrove, "Breaking Down Trade Barriers: Avoiding the China Syndrome," Consortium Standards Bulletin, Vol III, No. 5 (May 2004) and United States Trade Representative, “2004 Report to Congress on China’s WTO Compliance, pp. 42-43.

16. L iu Yuan, “ISO Meeting Fails to Back WAPI Standard.” China Daily (February 25, 2005).

17.China.org, “Call to Back WAPI Standard,” (April 8, 2005). Interestingly, while MCNs certainly can marshal forces in the standards bodies of many nations (and regions), a frequent complaint in the U.S. is that it has negligible influence in ISO, while“block voting” (e.g., by the European Union) conveys far greater power to nations that agree upon a common standards strategy.

18. Eric Nee, “The China Syndrome,” CIO Insight (March 1, 2004) no pagination.

19. Asia Times , “China Weighs 3G Phone Options” (February 8, 2005)

20. Bloomberg. COM , “Ericsson’s Svanberg Expects Four 3G Licenses in China,” (March 8, 2005).

21. Peoples Daily , “China Ushers in Era of 3G Cooperation” (April 9, 2005).

22. For a detailed review of China’s software strategy in general, and its anti-Windows/pro-Linux strategy in particular, see Richard P. Suttmeier and Yao Xiangkui, "China's Post-WTO Technology Policy: Standards, Software, and the Changing Nature of Techno-Nationalism," The National Bureau of Asian Research, NBR Special Report No.7 (May 2004), pp.31-42.

23. Ibid. p. 5

 

---

TRENDS:

TOP DOWN OR BOTTOM UP?

A TALE OF TWO STANDARDS SYSTEMS

Andrew Updegrove

Introduction: National standards systems typically echo the political methodologies of the countries in which they operate. This is hardly surprising, in that the consensus-based process of developing standards is in many respects political in nature. As a result, those countries that exercise the most centralized federal control are more likely to have a single national standards organization, while those that have political systems that are more locally responsive are apt to have distributed infrastructures that evolve more organically and dynamically.

The two countries that perhaps most dramatically exemplify this observation are the Peoples Republic of China and the United States. In the nomenclature most often used in American standards circles, the two countries have adopted “top down” and “bottom up” approaches, respectively.

The question of which system (if either) is “better” than the other is an interesting one. Equally significant are the related questions of whether, if one system indeed is better, when is that the case, and why? Examining these questions is the subject of this article.

In this corner, China: While private enterprise now flourishes in China, the invisible hand of capitalism has hardly succeeded in replacing centralized direction of the national economy by China’s communist leadership. Nor have private companies been encouraged by that government to engage in standards activities, other than in a manner consistent with and supportive of national standards policies.

As examined in some detail in the previous article (The Yin and Yang of China’s Trade Strategy: Developing a Standards Strategy in Compliance with the WTO ), China has created an enormous, centrally-managed standards infrastructure employing (in 2003) an astonishing 27,800 government employees in 260 technical committees and 422 subcommittees. This vast apparatus is directed at achieving the goals of the current PRC five year plan, which has a focus on research and development in order to transform China from a low-cost, low margin workshop building products to foreign orders into a global manufacturer of its own high margin, domestically branded goods.

The strategy for achieving this goal tasks the Chinese standards infrastructure with:

• The creation of a list of technologies in areas such as telecommunications and consumer electronics that are vital to building a national infrastructure and a higher-margin manufacturing base.
• Identifying those standards in place or under development elsewhere in these areas that would require the payment of significant royalties by Chinese manufacturers.
• Deploying technical staff in relevant ministries (such as the Ministry of Information Industry, or MII) to create new standards, either in whole, or in part, to avoid the need to pay such royalties, and filing domestic patents under these standards when possible.
• Approving these standards when completed; requiring their implementation in domestic products; and licensing patent rights under these standards on a limited basis that favors domestic manufacturers.

While implementing all elements of this grand strategy is difficult to accomplish under the World Trade Organizations’ (WTO) Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), China appears to be pursuing this goal to the maximum extent possible.

And in this corner, the United States: The standard setting system in the United States could scarcely be more different. Instead of government tasking its employees to create standards, private citizens create them (and other commonalities, such as open source software), either at the behest of their employers through consortia, accredited standards development organizations (SDOs), and (more recently) open source projects, or of their own volition as individual members of SDOs and open source projects.

Moreover, there is no central direction of the standard setting process whatsoever by Federal or state governments, nor is there any systemic, direct economic support from public sources. Such benefits as the U.S. government does provide are instead indirect, and include:

• Pre-standardization funded research (e.g., through the National Institute of Science and Technology and grants to fund test bed projects in certain consortia).
• Direction of government procurement (through the passage of the Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995 (TTA), which requires government agencies to participate in standard setting organizations, as well as to purchase products that conform to open industry, rather than government-unique, standards whenever possible).
• Legislation to lessen the antitrust risks of collaboration (through the National Cooperative Research and Production Act, as from time to time amended).
• Voicing objections and filing complaints against violations by other countries of rules against erecting technical barriers to trade through abuse of standard setting and conformance testing.

While each of these efforts (and most particularly the passage of the TTA) is significant and helpful, they collectively demonstrate a “hands off” approach to standard setting that allows the marketplace to determine what types of standards are needed, and what types of organizations may best be employed to create them.

Top Down vs. Bottom Up: Superficially, each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages, which may be summarized as follows, beginning with China:

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

The United States system, on the other hand, stacks up as follows:

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

As can be expected, each system will be more advantageous in some circumstances, and less so in others.

The right tool for the job? With the above as prelude, it is possible to ask whether China has designed the right infrastructure to achieve its goals, and whether it has devised a strategy that is optimized to take advantage of that infrastructure? And finally, how skillfully is China playing its hand globally?

China’s new strategies are still being deployed, and the jury's verdict therefore, remains to be heard. But a preliminary score card might look something like this, based on the outcomes of several instances in which China has tried most visibly to deploy its standards strategy to domestic advantage?

     Structure: The infrastructure that China has designed is formidable, and its ability to identify goals and commission standards has been demonstrated. Finally, the enormity of its resources permits a broad work program to be maintained, as well as the integration of that program into both research and development as well as final productization. It is still too early, however, to know whether this potential will be realized, or whether bureaucratic or other issues will lead to centralization being more of a curse than a blessing.

     Technical effectiveness: There is as yet not much data upon which to judge China’s technical prowess in creating robust standards, but some interesting data will become available soon. Of particular interest will be China's own decision on granting 3G telephone licenses, and specifically whether its homegrown TD-CDMA standard will be chosen. Field-testing of TD-CDMA is scheduled to be completed in June.

     Diplomatic effectiveness: To date, China has not been successful in holding the line on enforcing its domestic WAPI wireless security standard. Instead, an international hue and cry of vendors, backed up by direct intervention by the United States at the highest diplomatic levels, resulted in the “indefinite postponement” of the required application of that standard.

     Standards body participation: China has failed thus far to prevail in persuading the relevant ISO working group to incorporate the Chinese WAPI proposal into the wireless standard under study. And, while China is beginning to engage in global de jure standards bodies, it has not yet begun broadly participating in consortia. On the other hand, a number of consortia have recently scheduled large meetings in China, indicating a recognition of the need to accommodate Chinese views and encourage Chinese participation.

In summary, it is still premature to form firm judgments on how successful China will be in deploying its recently devised standards strategy. But it is clear that if its substantial investment in infrastructureis to pay off, its political skills as they relate to the highly competitive world of standards will need to be further refined.

Effectiveness of United States Response: It is also interesting to ask how successful the United States has been to date, and will be in the future, in responding to China’s new standards initiatives, using the same measures:

     Structure: American’s highly distributed standards infrastructure will have the advantage of speed and responsiveness to evolving market conditions, but will suffer when it comes to coordination, since every company, and every standards development organization, is a free agent in devising its own standards strategies. While such a structure can be quite effective in addressing a particular standards challenge, it is not well equipped to confront the coordinated initiatives of powerful national governments abroad.

     Technical Effectiveness: The rough and tumble of commercial competition is notoriously apt to lead to the success of the best marketed, rather than the best technical, results. Also, standards development organizations that put the greatest emphasis on consensus may be slow to market with watered down standards, and game playing in any type of organization can result in delays.

     Diplomatic effectiveness: As regards China, United States vendors and U.S. headquartered MNCs are in far better field position than would ordinarily be the case, due to the fact that the U.S. is entitled to monitor (and is in fact very strictly monitoring) China’s compliance with its WTO and TBT obligations. This scrutiny is not likely to be relaxed even after China's WTO accession probation period expires, due to the magnitude of China's impact on the U.S. economy as both an exporter and an importer of goods, and due to its increasing role in exacerbating America's ever-widening balance of trade deficit. Still, it is unlikely that the U.S. government will become actively involved in every case, leaving China with the opportunity to probe for weaknesses across a broad front.

     Standards body effectiveness: While China is still learning how to play the game, the United States may expect to hold the upper hand. However, given the fact that there is no current mechanism in place to coordinate the actions, positions and strategies of consortia (which are disproportionately responsible for the development of the information and communications technology standards that are most at issue), this situation may reverse as China forms closer ties with other nations and regions, such as Europe.

In summary, the United States is well positioned in the short run, but unless it embarks upon a conscious effort to craft and deploy a systemic response to China’s standards strategy, it may be overtaken in the future.

Conclusions: The ongoing deployment of China’s new standards strategy will provide a textbook test of the efficacy of “top down” standards regimes vs. their “bottom up” peers. Currently, China is in many ways still on a learning curve, as it tests its strategy in the trenches of global commerce. As a result, its early forays into standards politics would at best be expected to result in mixed success. But as its skills increase, its formidable infrastructural commitment may be expected to raise its rate of success.

Similarly, given China’s manufacturing power, it may be expected that other countries that also have national strategies will (as Europe already has) make overtures that may lead to alliances that may work to U.S. disadvantage. Moreover, individual multinational corporations may opt to adopt China's domestic standards regardless of their adoption of different standards in other markets, if that is the price of admission to so vast a market

But perhaps most tellingly, the mere fact that China has incorporated standards into its national policies and interwoven a standards-based strategy into its five year plan will be likely to put United States economic interests at a disadvantage, if there is no conscious effort to craft a responsive coordinated strategy. Unfortunately for the United States, a “bottom up” system has few mechanisms in its tool kit to devise and deploy such a strategy.

Ultimately, it is likely that there will be many variables that go beyond a simplistic evaluation of standard setting approaches that will affect final outcomes. But United States industry would be unwise to ignore the challenge that China’s coordinated approach may present to the more casual and chaotic approach to standards that the United States has traditionally adopted.

Comments? Email:

Copyright 2005 Andrew Updegrove

---

FROM THE STANDARDS BLOG:

#27 Social Standards, School Violence, and Taboos: In Respect of Red Lake   Perhaps the most pervasive type of standard to be found throughout human existence is the kind intended to regulate social actions. Indeed, as demonstrated by the many formal behaviors observed in chimpanzees and other primates, social standards predate even the evolution of hominids.

There must be something, therefore, that is particularly useful in such a persistent type of standard. What might that be, and what might sophisticated, freethinking inhabitants of the modern networked world learn from such quaint tools?

Simply stated, social behavior standards fall into two types: things you know that you should do, and things you know you should not do. In each case, these directions and proscriptions help societies avoid conflict, foster collaboration, and establish hierarchies. Collectively, they allow each member of a group to understand his or her obligations to the rest of the community, and hence allow us to manage to live in contact with each other with a minimum of friction and a maximum of cooperation.

While closely related to morals, behavioral standards are less theoretical and to the point. They are the Ten Commandments, and not the principals that lie behind them. Behavioral standards are therefore easier to understand and to obey (what’s not to get in “Thou Shalt Not Kill?”)

Social standards are remarkably economical in another way as well: they are literally learned at our parents’ knees. We may not even remember how or when we learned them, but we know what is expected of us for the rest of our lives (whether we actually conform to such standards, of course, is something else – especially when no one is looking).

Social standards, as a result, can be uniquely useful and essential to society, and perhaps more so now than ever as the world becomes a more crowded and contentious place.

Today, however, social standards are perhaps the least appreciated of all types of commonalities. Indeed, they are often denigrated as anachronistic and claustrophobic – as being inimical to freedom and a drag upon the joys of self-expression. All of which, of course, may be true, especially in small towns and other settings where everyone knows what everyone else is (and isn’t) doing.

Given how liberated and educated we all are today, does this mean that it is time for social standards to be consigned to the ash heap of history?

Well, perhaps they deserve a bit more consideration before we turn our backs upon them for good. Consider this:

For thousands of years, many societies have employed the concept of the “taboo” - a prohibition placed upon an act that is deemed to be so evil as to be unthinkable. To violate a taboo is to knowingly offend the gods, and to literally expel oneself from society. In early cultures, the result of such an expulsion could be expected to lead to starvation or violent death. In consequence, taboos have often supplied the front line of defense to protect the societies that employ them from the most threatening types of behavior.

The concept of the unthinkable is as clever as it is powerful, because (acts of rage aside) one must contemplate an act before one can commit it. If society can successfully instill the idea that a given act is truly “unthinkable,” then those who might otherwise be disposed to performing the same act will recoil from even considering the forbidden behavior. Problem solved.

The taboo can therefore be a very useful societal tool indeed. But in the United States (especially) today, we have decided not only to abandon the concept of the taboo, but also to aggressively destroy any vestiges of its power that might have survived in our collective unconsciousness. And all to serve the higher values of profit and entertainment.

I find it very strange that modern western society has chosen to embrace the fictionalized performance of the most horrific acts of violence as entertainment, first in television and cinema, and now in video games. Why is it that we find watching (and watching, and watching and watching) abhorrent behavior so worthwhile?

Strangely, we seem never to have considered the possibility that watching the fictionally unthinkable might eventually make actually doing the unthinkable more thinkable for some people.

One of the latest examples of behavior that American society professes to find “unthinkable” is school violence. An almost universal cry of “Why?” greets each new instance of carnage, whether by an adult, or by a child (as at Columbine ten years ago this month, and at the Red Lake Indian Reservation only a few weeks ago). Each time such an event bursts once again into the headlines, we throw up our hands and profess an inability to plumb the depths of such “inconceivable” behavior.

But what justification, after all, have we to regard violent behavior by adolescents as unthinkable? In fact, our society barrages children with a flood of images - some fictional, and some in the news, that make drawing, aiming and firing a gun at another human being very conceivable indeed. Most tellingly, we even regard adolescent Laser Tag and paintball parties as being nothing other than good, clean American fun. Why not dress children up in faux flak jackets, hand them realistic looking weapons, and invite them to stalk and “kill” their peers?

Why not indeed? Perhaps because we have not only thrown out the concept of the taboo, but even encouraged adolescents to “try out” what it feels like to waste someone who may have bullied them. The trigger gets pulled, the “bullet” hits, and the shooter “wins”, with no immediate consequences.

What are we thinking (if indeed we are thinking at all)?

We all know that suicide is disturbingly prevalent among adolescents. Hence, we know that many children can face with equanimity the taking of an action that represents the ultimate act of violence to the perpetrator himself. If this act of detachment or rationalization - the taking of one’s own life - is so thinkable to an adolescent, why are we surprised if the same child instead chooses to resolve differences by doing what they did or saw on Saturday at the paint ball party - and this time using Dad’s gun?

Society needs to express moral indignation in a consistent and clear fashion. If we truly profess to believe that certain behaviors are inconceivable, then society should not demonstrate ambivalence on the subject. Moreover, we should recognize (and even respect) the inexperience and confusion of adolescents, and not impose a burden of discernment upon them that some, demonstrably, are not able to bear. Each of us owes it to our own children to give all children every tool at society’s disposal to demarcate clear boundaries between what is right and what is wrong.

Comments? Email:

Copyright 2005 Andrew Updegrove

The opinions expressed in the Standards Blog are those of the author alone, and not necessarily those of
Gesmer Updegrove LLP

Postings are made to the Standards Blog on a regular basis. Bookmark:

THE REST OF THE NEWS

For up to date news every day, bookmark the ConsortiumInfo.org Standards News Section Or take advantage of our RSS Feed

Standards and Society

We are one; we are the Web: As the World Wide Web begins its second decade of promise of global accessibility of information for all, there are ever more frequent examples of that promise being fulfilled. The first two stories below symbolize the increasing equality of access to the Internet in both the third and the first world, while the third gives evidence of the World Wide Web Consortium’s continuing commitment to give equal access and influence to countries large and small, rich and poor. The last story indicates a different type of maturation taking place: the increasing interest being taken by global governance bodies (i.e., the United Nations and the venerable International Telecommunications Union) in the Internet – and more particularly, who should “govern” it.

Africa: Internet Advances
AllAfrica.com, April 22, 2005 -- As of April 2005, the African continent now has its own regional internet registry, AfriNic, with responsibility for assignment of internet addresses within the continent. This long-awaited development has the potential to save some $500 million in fees paid outside the continent each year to registries in Europe and North America. The agency, which received formal approval at an international meeting in Argentina on April 8, is headquartered in Mauritius, with an operations center in South Africa and back-up facilities in Egypt. The launch of AfriNic is one sign of the emerging maturity of internet operations in Africa, as advances at many levels move beyond conference talk about information technology to practical applications. While gaps in infrastructure and equipment are still substantial, more and more advances now depend on the human capacity to take cost-effective advantage of those opportunities already available…. Full Story

Europe has its own Internet domain
softpedia.com March 26, 2005 -- The organization internationally entitled to grant and administrate web domains, ICAAN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the release of an European web domain characterized by the .eu extension. During an ICAAN recent meeting,