Standards made in Europe for a global use

This commentary reflects on the contributions by Egan and Delimatsis and Verghese that provide historical accounts of ETSI’s origin and its dynamic evolution, and attempt at explaining its resilience. In this commentary, we place focus on ETSI’s unique attributes and their dynamic evolution to arrive at a better understanding of its resilience during critical moments, and over time. We identify three such key attributes, namely ETSI’s institutional set-up and openness, its standard setting activities and flexibility, and the ETSI IPR policy. The article illuminates their importance, also in ETSI’s interactions with the European Commission, and how these traits originated, were activated, and evolved during critical moments. Taken together, these contributions suggest that the governance reforms proposed by the EU risk undermining the attractiveness of open European ICT standardization, a key ingredient of ETSI’s very success in ICT matters.