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Open up for open standards

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CIOL Bureau
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There is a belief propagated by some that standardization stifles innovation while on the other hand, the greatest innovations have happened on environments provided through Standardization. A very good example is the innovations that have been enabled by the Internet. The Internet exists because of the standards adopted for networking (TCP/IP), browsers (HTML) etc. However, one needs to be extremely careful in how one chooses the standards. If the standards are such that it gives an unfair advantage to one single company or a fixed group of companies, then for sure such a standard would stifle competition.

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Lets take a hypothetical case of standardization of verbal communication. After all, verbal communication is one of the oldest information technologies. Lets assume that Government of India decides that since most legal documents in the country are in English, hence English will be made the mandatory standard for communication. The standard obviously ignores the fact that less than 7% of the population speaks English. Government of India decides that all documents must follow Wren and Martin compliant grammar to qualify as the Standard English.

As a result, the Bureau of Indian Standards scrambles to establish a large building and hire an army of experts to validate the compliance to the standard of all verbal communications being made in India. Quickly, the Queen of England imposes a royalty of 1 pence for sentence communicated in English that is Wren and Martin compliant. Immediately, riots break out in a village of Technocrat.

Let it be royalty free

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So what went wrong? Clearly, the standard chosen was not royalty free in perpetuity. In addition, the standard was chosen keeping in mind the interests of a privileged few who were already using that communication tool, ignoring the millions who had to adopt that tool at great pains and costs. Moreover the standard chosen supported a particular technology with no competition as the standard excluded all other kinds of technology. And finally, the standard implied a compromise of national sovereignty.

The above is not just a hypothetical case but we see such standards are being adopted regularly, that are detrimental to the economy and the competitiveness of the economy.

What we are observing is a new kind of colonization, which I would like to term as the digital colonization. Colonization occurs when the rules of engagement are made under coercion or by deceit for the economic benefit of the perpetrators of the coercion or deceit. So what are the rules of engagement that are currently being used for digital colonization? Well, the modus operandi is very simple. A standard is driven to be adopted as a global standard based on the technology of a single corporation or a set of corporations that have a stranglehold on the technology through either a pool of patents or through their existing monopolistic advantage or both. So when the standard gets adopted as a global standard, all users of that standard are also forced to willy nilly use technology that is based on the companies that have a stranglehold on the technology. A very good example of such a standard is MPEG4 that is used in DVD players. In fact Chinese manufacturers manufacture DVD's that cost USD 20 to manufacture and then have to shell out approximately USD 20 as patent royalties for the DVD players since they use MPEG 4 (since that is the standard) !

Challenge for domestic industry

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Thus adoption of standards without due thought can cripple the domestic industry. The Bureau of Indian standards hence has a challenging and extremely responsible task at hand as it steers the standards adoption process through complex technological advances. Obviously, the focus of BIS is on adopting Open Standards.

So what are the characteristics of an open standard? To begin with, an Open Standard needs to be royalty free in perpetuity. Anyone adopting the standard would not have to bear the burden of paying a royalty to someone else who may hold a stranglehold on the standard. An Open Standard must ensure that it allows a large number of players to come out with offerings based on the given standard.

Standards adopted must also keep in mind the interests of the future users and not just the interests of the limited number of existing users. Typically, for most IT

Technologies in India, eg PC's and office productivity solutions, not even 10% of the population use the technologies. Thus one can assume that one is starting with a clean slate insofar as the interests of the majority are concerned.

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Standards should not be designed to support the intellectual property of a single company or a few companies. Clearly such standards hand over the technological sovereignty of the country on a platter to the company or companies that hold the intellectual property.

Needless to say, standards must support national legislations. Such legislations include critical legislations such as IT Act 2000, RTI and monopolies and restrictive trade practices act. Standards should be easy to implement and the adherence to the standard should be easy to verify. It is a self-defeating exercise if the standard adopted cannot be implemented or cannot be verified by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

Finally, the standards should be developed in an open process subject to extensive public review. Standards that are created by one entity or a few entities that form a cartel and the standard creation process does not have participation or has limited participation of end users, should never be adopted as a standard.

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Hopefully, if we follow the above principles, we can ensure that India escapes from digital colonization.

The author is Country Director- Government strategy, Sun Microsystems