Government’s Role in Developing the Digital Standards Ecosystem

Abstract

Standardisation was yielded transformational change in the 20th century, including through the introduction of barcodes and the advent of containerisation. Digital standards have the potential to deliver similar transformational change in the 21st, but this will require new ways of working. The potential exists because the standards architecture has network effects: the more businesses and government regulators adopt it, the more valuable it is to everyone in the club. Metcalf’s law – that the gains raise exponentially with increased uptake – highlights the potential opportunity.

The state has a particularly important role to play as steward of the standards system and ensuring that standards embedded in regulatory systems are fully interoperable with that wider system. The development of the digital standards ecosystem will require the government to enact a number of roles, but the state can’t achieve the required change on its own.

The key barrier is that the standards landscape is littered with competing and/or overlapping public and private standards, along with standards embedded in regulations. Cutting through this cannot be achieved by bottom-up incremental changes. It will require a top-down commitment to sustained collaboration from both government and industry.