Standard Setting

Standard setting yields substantial benefits to consumers and often promotes competition to benefit consumers. Nonetheless, at times, standard setting can give rise to potential consumer harms. By bringing together different players in an industry, the standard setting process provides an opportunity for collusion, deception and strategy about which regulators must be vigilant and proactive. The roundtable found that a standard setting organisation should represent divergent economic interests including the public sector and consumers in order to avoid problems such as those that may arise when only a restricted set of producers runs the standard setting process. Competition law is suitable for addressing only some of the harms to competition. The others may be combated using other legal avenues or in the system for obtaining patents. A particular challenge arises in the case of patent ambushes, when a party with a patent hides that from a standard setting organisation or even steers the standard setting organisation to embody the patent within a standard, and then, once a standard is agreed, asserts its patent rights to obtain high royalties. Other remedies beside competition law also exist. Policy makers need to decide whether potential competition problems need attention and, if so, how such problems can be resolved appropriately.