Preface

Preface

Description

TTechnical standardization policy has been animated for more than a century by pursuit of efficiencies from interoperability, and also in recent decades by active facilitation of economic and innovation gains achievable through competitive markets benefiting from network effects. Science and technology studies (STS) or Foucaldian power-knowledge frameworks diversify this perspective, animating inquiry into ways in which standards enact power allocations, distinguish as well as unify, exclude as well as normalize. National security priorities and geopolitical considerations add additional layers, as do state industrial or protectionist policies. Whether and how to take account of wider societal interests and state interests affected by standards and standardization processes, and what allocative mechanisms or compensatory remedies should accompany the distributional effects and externalities (positive and negative) of standards, are public policy questions that manifest themselves also in public law, but in the fragmentary and uneven ways traced in this lucid and thoughtfully constructed book. Whereas the companion volume examines intersections of political economy and law in the relations of technical standards to patents and the relations of standards and patents to antitrust or competition law, the present volume traverses other topics of technical standardization law with private– public implications that, if for the most part less litigated, are nonetheless fundamental. By “law” the contributors tend to mean formal law (state/national law, or inter-governmental law), in contrast to social norms or other forms of normative ordering with law-like features. The term “regulation” may be deployed to encompass this wider range of normative orderings. While the organizing frame of the book is technical standardization and formal law, the specificity of this frame in fact enables the book to shed much light on relations between standardization and regulation more broadly.

Source Publication

The Cambridge Handbook of Technical Standardization Law: Further Intersections of Public and Private Law

Source Editors/Authors

Jorge L. Contreras

Publication Date

2019

Preface

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