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Deutsch: Reform europäischer Normen: Blankovollmacht bremst offene Formate aus

The European standardisation system is being revamped. In the European Parliament, the Consumer Committee (IMCO) under its rapporteur Lara Comi (EPP, Italy) is deliberating a proposal from the European Commission. Parliament members face tricky regulatory decisions on the standardisation of services and participation of small enterprises.

These issues overshadow a ground-breaking novelty: an official "recognition" for specifications from private sector consortia in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT). Those "recognised ICT specifications" are not "standards" (developed by standards organisations) but still could be legally referenced by tenders for public procurement.

For an "recognition", ICT specifications have to meet quite unambitious requirements laid down in an Annex. Their development has to adhere to minimum trade rules from the World Trade Organisation Technical Barriers to Trade agreement, and essential patents for a specification would be made available under "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) terms by their holders. FRAND is not legally defined but usually these licensing terms require payment of a royalty to a patent holder, and exclude Free and Open Source software implementations.

In Europe a carte blanche recognition of ICT specifications may compromise the negotiating position of public procurement agencies for better, open formats. It would weaken the more ambitious openness spirit of the European Interoperability Strategy (EIS) and various existing laws, schemes and initiatives at the national level.

How to separate the wheat from the chaff? The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) advocates for the setting a "gold standard": Limiting the new privileged recognition to royalty-free open formats, without any discrimination of the development model. In the digital world this openness dominates. Open formats such as HTML are at the heart of the Internet.

European Standardisation 2011/0150(COD)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?id=591938

IMCO draft report of Lara Comi (EPP)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=COMPARL&mode=XM...

IMCO amendments (66-276)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=COMPARL&mode=XM...

European Commission proposal COM(2011) 315 final
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0315:FI...

FFII: European Standardisation Reform lowers the bar (10.02.2012)
https://press.ffii.org/Press%20releases/European%20Standardisation%20R...

(contribution by André Rebentisch)