Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Standard setting in markets: the browser war
- 2 Competition through institutional form: the case of cluster tool standards
- 3 The economic realities of open standards: black, white, and many shades of gray
- 4 Coordination costs and standard setting: lessons from 56K modems
- 5 Promoting e-business through vertical IS standards: lessons from the US home mortgage industry
- 6 Intellectual property and standardization committee participation in the US modem industry
- 7 Manipulating interface standards as an anticompetitive strategy
- 8 Delay and de jure standardization: exploring the slowdown in Internet standards development
- 9 Standardization: a failing paradigm
- 10 Standards battles and public policy
- 11 Switching to digital television: business and public policy issues
- 12 Should competition policy favor compatibility?
- Index
- References
3 - The economic realities of open standards: black, white, and many shades of gray
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
By
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Standard setting in markets: the browser war
- 2 Competition through institutional form: the case of cluster tool standards
- 3 The economic realities of open standards: black, white, and many shades of gray
- 4 Coordination costs and standard setting: lessons from 56K modems
- 5 Promoting e-business through vertical IS standards: lessons from the US home mortgage industry
- 6 Intellectual property and standardization committee participation in the US modem industry
- 7 Manipulating interface standards as an anticompetitive strategy
- 8 Delay and de jure standardization: exploring the slowdown in Internet standards development
- 9 Standardization: a failing paradigm
- 10 Standards battles and public policy
- 11 Switching to digital television: business and public policy issues
- 12 Should competition policy favor compatibility?
- Index
- References
Summary
Abstract
Open standards have long been popular among buyers of goods and services in the information technology sector. Self-interested buyers and sellers, however, have had incentives to overstate (or understate) the openness of various standards. This paper rejects the simplified view that there is a single model of an open standard, as well as the assumption that a fully open solution is always an optimal (or even a feasible) outcome. The author analyzes various economic and technological forces that make standards more or less open and how these economic forces are affected by the policy choices available to firms, standard setting organizations, and regulators. The author uses this analysis to suggest objective measures for standards openness and a typology of common bundles of standards rights; he also notes the practical limits to open standards.
Open standards: ideals vs. reality
The concept of “open systems” has become an icon to conveniently express all that is good about computing. It … has always been held up as the ideal to which computing should subscribe.
(Cargill 1994, 3)As Cargill indicates, “open” for compatibility standards has been promoted as a universally good thing – right up there with motherhood and apple pie. For many corporate and individual users of information technologies, open standards are the ne plus ultra for external technologies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Standards and Public Policy , pp. 87 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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