The CEO of a technology multinational company made an interesting point in an article published by McKinsey. For him, maintaining separate legal entities is no longer enough to preserve market access:

“It’s about having a completely different tech stack to comply with local regulations. The cost of doing business globally has just gone through the roof.”

In the same article, the leader of a European consumer-goods company explained that diverging standards had doubled or tripled the company’s technology costs.

Recently a report from the Hinrich Foundation warns that politicisation of semiconductors could split the industry into isolated geopolitical spheres, with competing standards and conflicting US–China regulation.

In my previous article Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization, I developed three possible geopolitical scenarios for standardization. The first scenario is managed pluralism, where major blocs keep essential economic and technical ties despite building higher walls. International standards still matter but they now share the space with stronger regional rules and private consortia. The second is hard fragmentation and digital decoupling. This is the escalation phase. Blocs build entirely separate tech infrastructures and compliance silos, forcing companies to adapt products, certifications, and compliance processes for each market. Finally, collaborative competition, where governments realize that major, systemic crises like climate change or cybersecurity require cross-border tools, using international standards as political stabilizers.

Taken together, the examples in the McKinsey article and the warning in the Hinrich Foundation’s report look increasingly like the second scenario, hard fragmentation, a direction already taken in strategically sensitive domains.

What does this shift from global interoperability to parallel technical and compliance ecosystems mean for companies, and what must standards bodies do to prevent voluntary standards from becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution?

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For many, the crisis in Ceuta was seen as the collapse of European unity. Tens of thousands of migrants arrived on the Spanish territory in a single day. Italy said it would suspend its Schengen arrangement with Spain and called for the country’s broader suspension from the zone. Denmark and Finland backed the demand, and the escalation culminated when twenty-two leaders of EU countries signed a letter criticizing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s migration policies for undermining the security of the bloc’s external borders.1

Reading the comments, I thought: has such a thing as European unity really ever existed? What about standardization?

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Last month, at the CEN and CENELEC General Assemblies in Agia Napa, Cyprus, (better known for crystal‑clear water, beautiful beaches and nightlife than for institutional advances), members of the two organizations signed the Cyprus Commitment, a shared agreement to modernize the European Standardization System.

The moment of the signature was widely promoted on social networks:

If you’ve been following The Unstandardized, you already know my perspective on what CEN and CENELEC previously described as a “bold new value proposition” in a LinkedIn post:

• European standardization and the illusion of invisible power.

Now, does this agreement brings clarity around?

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For decades, the global standardization system rested on a relatively clear understanding of what is considered an “international standard”. Under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement, international standards should follow six core principles: transparency, openness, impartiality and consensus, effectiveness and relevance, coherence, and a development dimension. If you’ve been following me, you will have read how ISO, IEC and ITU, all located in Geneva, became the main organizations seen as consistently operating under these principles and providing the technical backbone for global trade:

• Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization.

In recent years, this landscape has started to shift, with technical standards increasingly used as tools of foreign policy and strategic competition. States, alone or grouped in the form of economic or political blocs, are now building and empowering parallel architectures for standards development that coexist with, and sometimes bypass, the three Geneva‑based institutions. This is what I call “strategic parallel standardization”, a concept that this article develops and uses to examine its implications for the international standardization system.

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There is so much that is posted on social media about standards bodies’ governance meetings and workshops that these streams of content have become a surprisingly rich source of information. If you know what you are looking for, two or three posts are often enough to reconstruct the narrative. Sometimes, a sing…

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Dear Readers,

I am now back to Geneva after four months in Mexico City. Here is a new edition of The Unstandardized Digest:

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Dear Readers of The Unstandardized,

Here is a new selection of news, articles, videos or podcasts that came to my attention recently:

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Business model innovation and digital transformation are occupying a large part of the discussions in standards bodies, with various projects around these issues currently being deployed.

At international level, ISO and IEC are pursuing their SMART Standards programme, which aims to deliver machine‑readable, interoperable standards and to explore new business models for their distribution.

In the United States, SAE International has established the Digital Standards Alliance (DSA) under SAE ITC to “accelerate the integration and use of digital standards across the entire product development lifecycle” and to coordinate the standards industry’s digital transformation around common use cases and services.

In Europe, CEN and CENELEC, two of the three European Standards Organizations recognised under Regulation 1025/20121, recently announced a new value proposition to “move away from a traditional, document‑led model and towards a dynamic model centred around added‑value digital standardization services” (see my previous article European standardization and the illusion of invisible power).

Initiatives described as “digital transformation” in standards bodies are not new. In the 1980s, ISO launched a project to publish its standards in SGML, already with machine‑readable ambitions for its standards, before being abandoned a few years later. In the mid‑1990s, most standards bodies successfully converted their standards from print to PDF, mostly through scanning, enabling the sale of standards via online stores. At the same time, offset printing was progressively replaced by digital, print‑on‑demand workflows, resulting in substantial gains in efficiency. Then came the early twenty‑first century and, somewhat paradoxically, almost a full decade of inertia. It took indeed until 2011 for ISO to relaunch an XML project that was dormant, and to reopen the conversation on structured, reusable standards content. Since then, announcements about “digital transformation” have multiplied, especially around SMART Standards, a major initiative launched in 2021 following the recommendations of ISO’s Technical Management Board Strategic Advisory Group on Machine Readable Standards (ISO/TMB SAG MRS).

If the promise of transformation is everywhere in the communications, its effects on how standards bodies create, deliver and capture value are much harder to see. Despite all this activity and projects, no genuinely “disruptive”, high‑value products or services have emerged at scale, and the underlying business models of standards bodies remain variations of the sale and licensing of their documents.

This article explores why, despite multiple waves of digital initiatives and substantial investments, standards bodies are still struggling to achieve genuine business model innovation, seem to go round in circles, and what they can realistically do about it. To summarize, the high‑level view is that the main obstacles are not technical but conceptual, cultural, structural and political. The current fascination with “digital standards” often hides the real questions, particularly on the fundamental dynamics of why standards are developed and bought, and how they are used, two aspects that remain widely misunderstood.

The argument will develop over ten parts:

• Part 1 - The unbearable pressure: The current pressure on standards bodies and their funding, including calls for free access to standards, legal challenges around standards referenced in legislation, reduction in public subsidies, and geopolitical tensions.

• Part 2 - The struggles: How standards bodies have responded so far, mostly through digital publishing projects, and why many initiatives failed to deliver the expected impact or return on investment.

• Part 3 - The business model confusion: How the lack of clarity around the concept of “business model” leads to poor strategic choices.

• Part 4 - History of standards sales: How standards sales emerged and became central to funding of several standards bodies, and why this configuration is path‑dependent rather than the product of deliberate design.

• Part 5 - Market (mis)understanding: The economic nature of standards as products, and how misreading the demand has led to chronic misalignment between standards bodies and their markets.

• Part 6 - The obsession with digital transformation: How the pressure to “digitalize everything” has turned digital transformation into a mantra, often reduced to tooling and formats.

• Part 7 - When inspiration comes from the wrong benchmark: Why analogies with the music industry and autonomous driving are poor templates for standardization and costly strategic diversions.

• Part 8 - Other barriers to business model innovation: Internal blockers that make transformation so difficult.

• Part 9 - Where we are now: A system that is technologically more sophisticated but financially fragile and strategically hesitant.

• Part 10 - Recommendations: Directions for standards bodies that really want to move towards business models and strategies that are both sustainable and compatible with their public‑interest missions.

So, let’s dive in!

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Europe is reforming how it sells standards while the rest of the world is competing to own them. This contrast finds its most visible expression in a single phrase from a post published this week on LinkedIn by CEN and CENELEC1:

Standards to “remain the trusted, invisible engine of the Single Market”: this is a striking image, and a deeply revealing one. As the United States is leveraging bilateral trade deals to redraw the rules of international standardization, and as China consistently executes its strategy to lead the technical bodies that define the technologies of tomorrow, Europe’s response is not to change, to transition from documents to digital services, and to embrace invisibility as a guiding aspiration.

Is this a vision? Or is it a concession dressed in the language of transformation?

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The world order as we know it since the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is now behind us. The period of “Happy Globalization”, as economists and think tanks now like to describe it, going roughly from the early 1980s to around 2010, was based on three main pillars:

• A belief in the liberalization of trade and investments.

• The delegation of technical rule‑making to private and semi‑private standards and regulatory bodies.

• The use of international standards as the primary technical infrastructure for integrating markets and reducing regulatory friction.

During that period, voluntary, consensus-based standardization created immense public value. Today the world is fragmented and the standardization ecosystem is under growing structural pressure driven by geopolitical forces. In this article, I will explore the profound changes that are reshaping standardization, develop potential future scenarios, and present strategies that standards bodies can adopt to survive and remain influential.

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Dear Readers,

Back to The Unstandardized after a few weeks of travels. I am now in Mexico City for the next four months and will be attending Accuris SPAB meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the end of February, where I will speak about standards and geopolitics. In the meantime, here is a new selection of news, …

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently:

About standards users

IFAN, the International Federation of Standards Users, has published in October its standards users survey. This …

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently:

About international organizations’ funding

International organizations in Geneva are facing major challenges due to substantial decreas…

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently while I am writing my next essay for The Unstandardized:

From standards organizations

• IEC Annual Report 2024

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently.

About standards bodies’ business models

A number of US Standards Development Organizations (SDO) have formally opposed the Pro Codes Act

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently.

Events to come

• IFAN Webinar - Navigating the AI Landscape: Impacts and opportunities for standards users

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Last week U.S. court ruling in a case involving the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, affirming that the use of books to train its AI model Claude is fair use and transformative1, is not a good news for standards bodies. The decision comes at the moment where these bodies are developing policies so that they can keep the exclusive use of the content in their standards to train, in the future, their own AI models. The verdict directly undermines such plans as any AI generative system can now ingest and repurpose technical content without licensing or compensation, as long as the material has been legally acquired.

The Anthropic ruling compounds the impact of the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) decision on 5 March 2024 requiring free public access to harmonized standards referenced in EU law, with the argument that public interest outweighs the protection of commercial interests of standards bodies. While it is hoped that the mandate for free access to standards in Europe can be contained to the continent and is not going to produce a domino effect, another front is now opening in the United States that is compromising the objectives of standards bodies to add value to the content in standards, and develop new revenues streams through technology.

This combination accelerates the existential threat to the revenues that standards bodies directly derive from the sales of standards. Let’s see why a fundamental shift of mindset, from the defensive copyright policies followed so far to an open exploitation of the content in standards, is not just advisable but critical for the survival of several standards bodies, and how such a shift can be provoked.

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At the recent G7 Summit in Canada, a landmark moment unfolded as the United Kingdom and the United States formally signed the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal (EPD)1 first announced in May. While media coverage focused on the incident involving the physical handling of the agreement, the true significance of the EPD has largely escaped notice, particularly within the standardization community. Which is unfortunate as the EPD contains provisions2 that can fundamentally reshape the global standardization landscape and redefine the roles of established multilateral, voluntary standards development organizations. Let’s examine the key elements of the deal and discuss the possible far-reaching implications for international standardization.

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I am Nicolas Fleury, 58 years old, Swiss living in Geneva. I worked for about 35 years at ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, the world’s largest developer and publisher of international standards. …

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