Governance within Standards Development Organizations: Who Owns the Game?

The past decade has witnessed the raise in prominence of interoperability and Internet standards in the wake of increased digitalization and technological advancement. Typically established by industry-driven association of professionals, often referred to as Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), standards and technical specifications are expected to address the needs of the industry and to benefit society. While SDOs arguably attempt to involve all directly and indirectly affected stakeholders in their standards development, the establishment of organizational rules and procedures, including Patent Policies, is often left to the discretion of the SDOs' governing bodies and may not necessarily represent consensus of all interested parties. Placing procedural guarantees in the limelight of standardization research, this paper seeks to compare the actors and procedures of different SDOs as regards their standards development, governance processes and dispute resolution. It observers that procedural rules for standard-setting are not per se applicable to the decisionmaking in the governing bodies of the SDOs, and aims to suggest the possible consequences of this disconnection.