Page 220 - Proceedings of the 2017 ITU Kaleidoscope

S2.3 Governance within standards development organizations: Who owns the game?
Olia Kanevskaia (TILEC & Tilbury Law School, The Netherlands)

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 decision-making in the governing bodies of the SDOs, and aims to
suggest the possible consequences of this disconnection.

S2.4 The standards revolution: Who will first put this new kid on the blockchain?*
Maria-Lluïsa Marsal-Llacuna, Miquel Oliver-Riera (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

Blockchain is here to stay. Some affirm that it is the next big thing after the Internet. Blockchain
is a network-based technology that rewards participants to assemble transactions which will next
configure blocks and later be part of a chain. Blockchain guarantees immutability and integrity of
data without the need of a third surveilling party. It is therefore a revolution in current systems of
trust. It also brings automation and self-execution of processes thanks to its embedded smart
contracts functionality. Current standards drafting and development processes can definitively
benefit from blockchain technology, and perhaps see the standardization domain revolutionize,
like it already happened in the fintech and insurtech arenas [1]. In this paper, we explain what
these advantages are. And, before new standard drafting models emerge from the disruptive
blockchain community, challenging traditional standard development models -with this paper-, we
want to inspire and give tools to established standardization bodies for them to take the lead and
initiate a transformation towards ‘Blockchained Standards’ so that they can keep their authority
and leadership in the field going forward.

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