Abstract

While the welfare implications of de jure standardization is an extremely complex question, economic theorists and standards practitioners alike have suggested that speed is an important dimension of performance for non-market Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs). A variety of factors may influence the timeliness of SSOs, including the complexity of the underlying technology; the commercial significance of the proposed standard; and the rules governing the consensus decision-making process. This chapter uses data from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to take a preliminary look at the relationship between the size, scope, and composition of SSO committees and the time required for those groups to reach a consensus. In particular, it documents a significant slowdown in IETF standard setting that coincides with the commercialization of the Internet during the 1990s. The chapter concludes by discussing several open questions related to the political economy of voluntary standards creation and suggesting that the increased availability of archival data – from institutions such as the IETF – makes this a promising area for empirical research.

Introduction

In 1986, twenty-one people attended the first meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – the organization that creates and maintains the technical standards used to run the Internet. Over the next fifteen years, the rapid growth and commercialization of the Internet helped make the IETF an important Standard Setting Organization (SSO) for the rapidly converging fields of computing and communications. By 2001, its meetings regularly drew more than 2,000 participants.