20 September 2009

Modernising ICT Standardisation in the European Union
– The Way Forward -
Response to the EU Commission White Paper

The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit organisation founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. ISOC-ECC is the coordinating body among the European Chapters of ISOC, these Chapters comprise principally ISOC's individual members in Europe. Policy issues with an essentially European dimension, such as this EU consultation, are normally addressed through ISOC-ECC, without necessarily engaging the whole of ISOC, world-wide.

The Internet Society is also the organisational home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). It provides the legal and financial framework so that the work of the IETF can take place.

1. ICT Standardisation policy in the EU

This paper is in response to the European Commission's request for comments on the White Paper issued on 3 July 2009. Our response follows broadly the structure and questions described in the White Paper. While broadly supporting the thrust of the White Paper, we consider that three aspects should be more specifically addressed:

1.1 The European Standardisation Organisations (ESOs): in view of the fact that convergence has now proceeded to a very large extent, it is no longer justified to attempt to work through three ESOs: CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Efficiency would be improved by merging the European ICT standardisation activities into a single entity. (These need not be geographically integrated, but it should have a single work programme and decision making procedure.) The future ESO should embrace open process and eschew costly participation.

1.2 The relationship between the ESOs and the international standardisation organisations (ISO, IEC, ITU) is not only one of "cooperation". International standardisation inevitably has a direct and growing impact on the Internal Market.

Consequently, the national standardisation bodies in the EU Member States should act internationally in a consistent and coordinated manner. The appropriate forum for organising this is the ESO.

1.3 The global forums and consortia: These are not all of the same kind. One would need to have criteria and methods to distinguish between genuinely global entities such as IETF and W3C and those which are rather combinations of large international corporations.

In all cases, the principles of openness, transparency and user participation must by applied.

2. Modernisation of ICT Standardisation in the EU

2.1 Attributes of ICT standards

1) Openness and (3) Balance: The reference to "... relevant stakeholder categories
and reflects user requirements" begs the question: Who decides? Relevant stakeholders, including user organisations should be able to decide for themselves ('self-selection') whether they need to participate in a particular standardisation process. Access to standardisation organisations and committees should not be financially prohibitive.

It is worth emphasising in this context that a principal reason for the success of IETFand W3C standards is that they are freely available. As a result, individuals and small groups of innovators and entrepreneurs have been able to initiate new services and products, several of which are today already vastly successful, which would not have been possible if equivalent standards had been developed and controlled by the traditional standardisation organisations, including the ESOs.

In this context we refer to the comments already submitted by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) which address specifically the policy of open process as implemented by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

(4) Transparency: The standardisation organisations could usefully make greater use of the Web to publish drafts and final texts. There is no longer any need for the documentation related to standardisation processes to be either restricted or only paper-based.

Final documents should be made widely available, free of charge, by the international
and European standardisation organisations.

Regarding the attributes of the standards themselves, we would agree with all six (6) points in the document. However, we consider that the IPR policies should be more rigourously codified. Indeed the expression "((F)RAND)" gives rise to some uncertainty and ambiguity. In general, IPR included in standards should be in the public domain, particularly as multiple patents and copyrights included in a single standard may give rise to costs and confusion which many manufactures, operators and users would be unwilling to risk. Unambiguous and open IPR in standards would contribute to competition. See 2.4 below.

2.3 Synergy with ICT Research

A principal objective of ICT Framework Programme projects has always been the promotion of international standards. Accordingly, the EU has a policy and budgetary obligation to ensure the necessary synergy.

Thus, more than "consultation" is required. (a) the FP R&D consortia should be fully aware of their objectives and obligations in this regard, including knowledge of the methods of relevant standardisation processes, (b) the cost of participating in relevant international standardisation organisations should be a reimbursable expense, included in the budgets of the projects concerned, ( c) participants in publicly funded R&D should be predisposed to make resulting IPR available on a royalty free basis if and when the results are incorporated in international or European standards, and (d) The European Commission's Directorates General concerned should actively coordinate the relationships between their R&D projects, including initial project evaluation, and the corresponding European and international standardisation activities.

The EU Framework Programme could also consider pooling IPR arising from publicly funded projects with a view to encouraging adoption and use of open standards.

2.4 Intellectual Property Rights

As already indicated above, we consider that a greater degree of rigour, transparency and openness is called for regarding IPR included in ICT standards. This approach should be actively carried forward by the EU, into the international standardisation organisations, relevant consortia and forums as well as to the WTO.

In the interests of interoperability and convergence, we consider that (a) open source solutions should be fully supported whenever possible, notably in public procurement, (b) IPR policies should be fully harmonised among the ESOs, pending their eventual merger, and (c) greater weight should be given to the economic and user advantages of royalty free IPRs included in standards.

Thus, we broadly support the suggestions regarding IPR included in the White Paper, subject to the comments already submitted by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

2.5 Integration of forums and consortia.

This question is of particular importance to the Internet Society because of the significance of the IETF as the principal forum for Internet standardisation. Actually, we suggest that the argument should be inverted: the question should be how to integrate European technical expertise and user interests into the global forums, rather than how to integrate these forums into the EU ICT standardisation process. We understand that certain FP R&D projects already include participation in such fora among their objectives. However, as indicated above, these global forums and consortia are not all of one sort: Some are much more open than others. Some integrate user interests ab initio, whereas others are limited to a few corporations. Accordingly a more discriminating policy would be called for.

On the other hand, point (h) suggests that the evaluation of the forum or consortium would be undertake for each standard. Thus, in effect, ex-post. That would be unduly restrictive and would have an a priori chilling effect on participation in the forum concerned. It would perhaps be better to evaluate the forum or consortium processes exante, reserving the possibility not to recognise the resulting standard should the approved processes not be fulfilled in practice for any specific standard.

2.6 Dialogue and Partnership with stakeholders

We have, of course, no objection to the EU improving the relevance and representativity of the European advisory and consultation processes, and accordingly support the proposals of the White Paper in this respect. It would be important to ensure that there are active links between the proposed policy platform and standards board and the actual standardisation work in the international and European entities concerned.

Through the vastly increased scope of ICT applications, largely resulting from the Internet, standards may now be required in industry, education, health, transport and logistics, domestic appliances, energy, banking and payments. Consequently the public interest in ICT standards now extends to privacy, security, consumer protection, the environment, the disadvantaged and disabled, and multilingualism, as well as the interoperability of ICT products and services. Consequently, when the EU provides policy guidance to ESO, this would nowadays extend beyond the scope of Information Society and Enterprise to include several other policy areas. The organisation of EU standardisation policy should be adapted accordingly. However, we suggest that it would be even more important to address the balance of participation of stakeholders in the standardisation process itself. As already indicated, this should be based on principles of openness and transparency with full access for all stakeholders. In practice this would usually mean strengthening the voice of user interests, public and private, which are often under-represented in present circumstances.