Why Does ‘Openness’ Matter?
By Susy Struble, Thiru Balasubramaniam, and Robin Gross
IT is increasingly embedded into our daily lives and continues to meld with traditional industries and applications such as healthcare, transportation, media, security, and telecommunications. Battles over non-interoperability and consumer access due to a lack of open IT standards are popping up in unexpected places. The automotive repair industry provides a good example of this: consumers and non-dealer-owned repair shops are fighting for access to technical interface information required for diagnosing and repairing cars, which are quickly becoming computers on wheels. Another example is the global debate around varying levels of ‘openness’ in standardised office document formats.
Open IT standards directly benefit society by driving innovation while mitigating adoption risks. Multiple, competing implementations – and interchangeability between these implementations – mean prices drop while innovation flourishes. In a competitive market, consumers and small businesses are more likely to find the product that suits their needs, depending on factors such as price or availability in a native language. Should their needs change, they can more easily switch to another product. A corollary benefit to this is creator/user control of data.
The lack of open IT standards can act as a trade barrier if it denies market access for companies or even whole economies (this point has been raised by China and others in the WTO Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade). A particularly onerous burden is placed on developing economies when their consumers and businesses have to pay royalties or meet other terms and conditions in order to use IT standards that are not truly open but still necessary to participate in the network. After all, patents are a limited monopoly granted by a government. Embedding patents into technical standards that are required for effective participation in the information society overextends this monopoly.
Lastly, there are other standardisation-related problems that contribute to the low participation of developing countries in the global information society. While these undoubtedly stem from where countries stand in their IT adoption/diffusion ‘lifecycle’, many of them miss out on the standards-creation process itself. Their concerns must be taken into account; after all, they include the majority of the world’s consumers and – hopefully soon – the majority of the world’s IT users and innovators.
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Susy Struble works for the Global Government Strategy group at Sun Microsystems. Robin Gross is the Executive Director of IP Justice and Thiru Balasubramaniam is the Geneva representative for Knowledge Ecology International.
This article was originally published for Bridges Weekly at http://www.ictsd.org in the issue November – December 2007 - No. 7
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ENDNOTE
1 (IEC, ISO and ITU. March 2007. Guidelines for the Implementation of the
Common Patent Policy. http://www.iec.ch/tctools/patent-guidelines.htm)