Standardization Process

The process of standardization can be a tedious and lengthy process, however formal standard setting is essential to developing new technologies, i.e. for quite a long time, the telecommunications industry has depended on the ITU to establish the telecommunications standards that have been adopted worldwide. The standards that are created through standards organizations lead to improved product quality, ensured interoperability of competitors’ products, and they provide a technological baseline for future research and product development. The process o establishing formal standard brings numerous benefits to the consumers including increased innovation, multiple market participants, reduced production costs, and the efficiency effects of product interchangeability.

Established Standards are distributed on a commercial basis rather than being provided free in order to provide funding for standards developers.

Moreover, standards produced by non-governmental entities remain the intellectual property of their developers and are protected, just like any other publications, by copyright laws and international treaties.

Of recent a new class of standards setters has appeared on the standardization arena, these are the special interest groups and the industry consortia. Though low on financial resources, some of them enjoy truly international acceptance. One example is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) whose standards for HTML, CSS, and XML are used universally throughout the world. There are also community-driven associations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a world-wide network of volunteers who collaborate to set standards for lower level software solutions, some industry-driven standards development efforts are also been funded by large corporations.