Too Many US Companies Reducing Investments in Standards Work: ANSI Chief

Governments worldwide view standards, especially for critical and emerging technologies, as competitive tools, “using them to create technical barriers that favor domestic industries while disadvantaging others,” Locascio said. “Technical excellence, not geopolitics, must drive international standards development.” Too many businesses don’t understand the competitive impact of standards “until it’s too late," she added.

As standards are politicized, many U.S. companies “are pulling back,” Locascio said. They’re reevaluating investments in standards bodies as “costs, rather than strategic necessities, and struggling to justify expert participation during challenging economic times.” Meanwhile, other nations are “surging” their investments, “explicitly linking standards to industrial policy," she said.

Standards development requires a strong focus from the federal government, Miller said, arguing that the Trump administration may not have put enough focus on the issue to date. The industry-led approach must work “hand in hand with our government,” and the administration needs to be “a key voice that represents the standardization here [to] the global community," she said. “Nothing could be more at the heart of the communications industry than global standards.”

There needs to be targeted investment in R&D, interagency coordination and collaboration, “and we aren’t seeing that,” Miller said. “I meet with one agency one day and another agency the next day, and it’s clear that they aren’t talking to each other."

The administration has also made it difficult to get visas for people to come to the U.S. for standards meetings, Miller noted. “We came out of an administration where I thought standardization had a new cachet,” she said. “We’re lacking the certainty and the clarity that we need from this current administration.”

Standards development is one of the most important things her alliance does, Miller added. “At the top of the list is 6G.” The group is also working on network-enabled AI, quantum computing and zero-trust and robocalling rules. Miller identified problems with the current process as well.

Moving Toward 6G

In the mobile wireless world, each generation of wireless lasts 10 years, a schedule set by the ITU, Miller said. 6G is set to deploy in 2029 or 2030, but there's pressure from the Trump administration to implement some iteration at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, she said. “Can we somehow take apart the process … and respond to a company’s needs for a functionality now, versus a 10-year cycle of an entire generation” of wireless?

What makes the U.S. standards development system unique and powerful is that it’s voluntary, led by the private sector and market-driven, Locascio said. “Many nations … rely on top-down, government-controlled standards that can be very politically motivated and stifle innovation.” But U.S. standards “reflect real-world needs because those building the technologies are at the table.”

In the last five years, “technology acceleration has outpaced traditional development cycles,” Locascio said, and “supply-chain disruptions exposed critical vulnerabilities.” The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated “how global challenges emerge and then how they can cascade.”

“Standards are the invisible infrastructure that powers our modern world,” Locascio added. “Hybrid meetings run on standardized internet protocols,” and “smartphones connect through standardized 5G networks.” Standards aren’t “just technical documents gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.”

Locascio's American National Standards Institute is currently working on the five-year update of its 2020 U.S. Standards Strategy.

Jason Matusow, general manager of Microsoft’s Corporate Standards Group, noted that some standards work touches on much broader issues and regulation. He mentioned AI, accessibility, cybersecurity, privacy and sustainability.

Standardization is ultimately “a people problem,” he said. As governments frame standardization “in the context of geopolitical competition," it makes it more difficult to get people together and find consensus. There's “unequivocal, empirical evidence that an industry-led system wins out,” he said. “If we don’t trust the system, then the standards are worthless.”

The reality “most people don’t grapple with” is the size of the standardization system, Matusow added. There are more than 1,000 standards bodies active at any given time, and tens of thousands of people are involved in standardization projects, he said. Other countries have studied the U.S. standards system “very closely,” while China has looked at ways to replicate the U.S. system.

In the U.S., "we should be running fast,” Matusow said. “Everybody else is trying to figure out how to keep up with what we’re doing. Don’t slow down.”