From early beginnings in military, science, and accounting, to the bewildering array of information technology we enjoy today, the payoff from IT has been significant time and labour savings, and at the heart of those savings are the standards on which information technology is based.
Standards are what make technology interoperable and prevent the duplication of effort. Duplication of effort is an insidious waste of time and labour and leads to more loss dealing with multiple incompatible systems.
A good example is the early days of the locomotive, where there were competing standards for the size of railroad tracks. The incompatibility meant that trains from one standard couldn’t run on the other standard’s tracks. Since both standards didn’t run everywhere, there were many instances of having to unload cargo from one train and onto another. Worse, it also drove up the costs of train engines and train cars.
Planning had to be different and even resulted in different regulation for both standards.
International standards maximise time and labour savings
From planet-spanning networks all the way down to something as simple as the USB-A or USB-C connector, international standards make it possible and maximise time and labour savings.
Standards bodies like the International Telecommunication Union, 3rd Generation Partnership Project, IEEE Standards Association, World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force, are just a few of the organisations that work on a world-wide basis to collaboratively create standards.
A good real-world example of standards is the ability for a cell phone to work almost anywhere on the planet. Or the ability to connect a laptop to a Wi-Fi access point regardless of who makes the laptop or the access point.
Deterioration of a commitment to standards
However, for years now there have been signs of deterioration of the commitment to standards, particularly by governmental organisations. Geopolitical tensions, trade wars, nationalism, national security concerns, and trade protectionism all threaten standards, particularly new ones.
Often, there are good intentions behind policies or laws that restrict the distribution of technology or attempt to discourage the spread of standards-based technology. However, for the first time in decades, the conditions are ripe to greatly slow or even derail the introduction of new information technology standards.
What’s the RISC?
A good example of this is around an open-source CPU standard called RISC-V (pronounced ‘risk-five’). Essentially, the RISC-V instruction set was designed to be royalty-free, for use in academic or commercial settings. Most CPU instruction sets require royalties such as the popular ARM instruction set from ARM Inc. RISC-V is designed to be applied in many possible applications and frees up anyone developing a RISC-V CPU from the costs and time associated with developing or licensing an instruction set.
However, there has been concern that RISC-V would damage competitors such as ARM Inc, who charge for their instruction set and architecture.
ARM has every right to charge for its hard work in intellectual property – its success in the market with so many companies producing ARM processors is validation enough.
Inevitably, politics
On the political front, there are national complications as well. In the US, there have been concerns that by using RISC-V, China or Russia could gain a technological advantage by using the technology to develop their own chips advanced chips, something the US has actively tried to prevent.
The geopolitical concerns by US politicians are understandable but ultimately misplaced in this case – RISC-V isn’t the ultra-advanced technology behind NVIDIA’s GPU offerings, it’s more of a utility type of technology.
Standards create competition and innovation
Ultimately, standards-based competition creates innovation and is a win for enterprises, customers, and, ultimately, governments. With growing nationalism and protectionism, the urge to restrict international technological standards down to the national level is growing.
What it will really do is create islands of technology and cost time and labour for everyone. If the trend to prioritise national interests continues, it will begin to have real effects on international standards bodies that allow for the incredible interoperability enjoyed today. Don’t let that happen.
