Unpacking the Biden Administration’s Strategy for Technical Standards: The Good, the Bad, and Ideas for Improvement
Success in the increasingly fierce competition for tech leadership relies partly on how well each country’s respective firms and experts influence the development of technical standards. Companies in the United States and their experts are key players because they are skilled at using the open, voluntary, industry-led, and consensus-based rules of standards organizations to turn their innovations into accepted technical specifications.
The Biden administration’s National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technologies (CET, “the strategy”) aims to strengthen U.S. leadership and competitiveness in international standards development. The strategy recognizes that international standards development is at an inflection point due to China’s growing tech prowess and participation in standards-setting discussions. However, the strategy’s response suffers from three key flaws. First, the strategy uses a distorted and overly powerful national security lens (instead of the usual innovation, competitiveness, and trade lens) to view technical standards, which leads to outcomes that undermine the U.S. tech sector. Second, it lacks genuine, good-faith engagement with the U.S. private sector, which is a major flaw given that the private sector is home to most experts developing new technologies and their associated standards. Third, the strategy correctly identifies China as a major concern regarding its use of standards for protectionist purposes but fails to mention or respond to the European Union’s (EU) similar efforts. This post analyzes the strategy and provides recommendations to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to help implement the strategy.
U.S. policymakers are paying growing attention to standards as they’re accustomed to their firms and their experts being global standards-setters, and they’re concerned about China’s growing participation. Policymakers are concerned as China uses China-specific (instead of international) technical standards for protectionism. Local standards are a technical barrier to trade as foreign firms have to spend considerable time and money to adjust products to abide by local standards even if they already use international standards. They’re also concerned about what policy preferences (such as privacy and surveillance) China may embed in technical standards for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition. China’s approach to technical standards, especially at government-based organizations like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), raises legitimate concerns.
Furthermore, the Biden administration has legitimate national security concerns about China and Chinese technology, especially related to core national security concerns like critical infrastructure. Likewise, the Biden administration has legitimate concerns about supply chains, innovation mercantilism, and economic coercion, which justifies its growing focus on economic security. However, the Biden administration’s strategy suffers from an incomplete and flawed analysis and understanding of technical standards and the challenge posed by China (and the EU). This needs to be corrected lest the strategy undermines the United States’ critical role in developing CETs and associated standards.
Key national security officials in the Biden administration are leading U.S. standards and technology policy in the wrong direction. The CET standards strategy reflects the Biden administration’s misguided perspective on standards, which supposedly complements the (mainly private sector-driven) 2020 U.S. Standards Strategy. However, it does an inadequate job. The 2020 U.S. Standards Strategy does not mention national security once, while it’s central to the CET standards strategy. Nearly every mention of standards’ role in supporting U.S. economic interests is followed by a mention of national security. This is a major shift as technical standards are traditionally seen as tools for innovation, competitiveness, and trade. They’re mainly developed by private sector experts (often from competing firms) and academia in an open and consensus-based way (and thus not favoring any one firm or country).
In contrast, the U.S. government’s direct role in setting standards is largely limited to determining the use of standards for specific government functions that involve core national security concerns. Government officials participate in some standards development organizations, but nowhere near as many as the private sector. Yet, the subtext of the strategy is that national security is the overriding priority and, more troublingly, that the U.S. government should play a bigger role in directly determining technical standards. This would be a major mistake.
Growing Chinese participation in international standards setting is setting off alarm bells among U.S. national security officials. They think their participation is a risk in and of itself and that their participation implicates the entire standards-setting system, regardless of whether theyimpact standards. This is made worse given these officials also mistakenly think that standards development involves sharing sensitive technical information as part of a zero-sum, adversarial process that China is winning. It’s, therefore, no surprise that the strategy falls short with its flawed analysis and recommendations.
Unfortunately, the strategy is based on incomplete data that it tries to spin to justify its view that Chinese participation in standards development organizations (SDOs) is a national security threat. There are thousands of governmental, quasi-governmental, and private sector/non-governmental SDOs working on all manner of tech issues, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, whose standards for HTML, CSS, and XML are used universally) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, which defines standard operating Internet protocols such as TCP/IP). Countless other SDOs are working on cloud computing, AI, and other CETs. Many will inevitably involve experts from Chinese firms, which can be a good thing, as it encourages them to use international standards (instead of China-specific standards) so there’s interoperability between products from China and the rest of the world.
The CET strategy references participation data that NIST collected in 2019, showing U.S. and Chinese submissions and leadership of SDOs. U.S. national security officials misused this NIST participation data to falsely equate the growing number of submissions from Chinese participants at SDOs with growing influence. Chinese SDO participation gets disproportionate attention in the United States (and Europe) as it is relatively easy to measure and compare yet is a poor indicator of a country’s influence on standards discussions. It’s the technical skill of the SDO developing a standard and the quality of standards proposals, not the quantity, that counts. For example, Chinese participants have submitted dozens/hundreds of poorly drafted standards submissions at the ITU, which is not an organization with the technical expertise for many new technologies. These submissions are poor quality and likely have little to no effect besides wasting the time of the people reviewing them. They do this as Chinese government agencies provide financial rewards for standards submissions, regardless of their quality.
This NIST data provides a problematic foundation for the strategy’s central concern about China’s growing participation in SDOs. First, the data was originally collected to show the Trump administration’s National Security Council exactly the opposite point the strategy makes—that when one zooms out, participation in the standards-setting system is broad and diverse. Participation only tells part of the story. Second, the data was from a relatively small sample group of SDOs and, therefore, isn’t representative. Responses to NIST’s request for information on Chinese participation in SDOs showed no systemic Chinese malinfluence. Third, it’s important to keep China’s growing SDO participation in context, as when it’s measured against the size of its economy, it lags far behind all other leading economies.
True standardization influence comes from contributors submitting early, well-developed drafts that form the basis for discussions that ultimately lead to final standards. The expert (or experts) that drafts first and well has influence. The United States has developed a pool of experts who are good at this. This is done by the private sector and other experts in academia and, in limited circumstances, by government officials. However, this type of standards power is much harder to measure and track over time, so it doesn’t get the attention that participation and submission data gets.
Second, the strategy and the Biden administration’s global engagement on technical standards suffers from the fact it simply doesn’t involve the U.S. private sector in any meaningful way when discussing standards at the G7, the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC), and the QUAD (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States). These forums’ respective work on standards is either unclear (due to a lack of genuine outreach and engagement), involves low-hanging fruit, and/or purposely avoids addressing substantive issues to maintain “good vibes.” This is clearly displayed in the strategy’s criticism of China’s use of technical standards for protectionism but not raising the EU’s similar efforts at the TTC. The lack of engagement with the private sector is a mistake because they’ll be the ones—given they develop the technologies and associated standards—to decide whether (or not) to engage in or adopt whatever outcomes these initiatives deliver. Private sector experts need to be involved for these initiatives to be sustainable and successful over a long time.
Third, failing to mention the EU’s use of technical standards for protectionism is a glaring omission. The U.S. strategy’s “objective 4: integrity and inclusivity” states that “the increasing attempts of some nations to tilt the playing field to their parochial advantage, we must ensure that standards development processes are technically sound, independent, and responsive to broadly shared market and societal needs.” Yet, this is exactly what the EU and its ownstandards strategy is doing in using protectionist technical standards to target U.S. standards, firms, and technologies. Most clearly, the EU purposely excludes experts from U.S. firms that have long made good-faith contributions to European standards development. It is pursuing an isolationist and protectionist approach to AI and a potentially broad range of standards. Yet, the strategy (and the Biden administration) fails to raise and address the EU’s problematic approach to standards.
Analysis and Recommendations for the Standards Strategy’s Action Plan
The CET standard strategy’s “lines of efforts” detail how the Biden administration plans to bring the strategy to life. Below analyzes and provides recommendations related to some of these:
Line of Effort 1: Increase Funding for Basic and Applied Research and Development (R&D)
The strategy mentions the Biden administration’s budget request for over $100 billion for R&D and to increase federal R&D by $9 billion to $210 billion. However, this has not been appropriated yet, so what will be provided is unclear. For example, as of October 2023, FY 2024 appropriations for research agencies are approximately $7.5 billion below authorized levels. If the Biden administration were serious about improving U.S. R&D spending, it would push to renew the tax law (which expired at the end of 2021) that allowed firms to fully expense their R&D costs.
More funding to basic and foundational research is great, but this type of R&D is relatively far removed from most standardization activities, which tend to occur alongside applied research when technologies are more mature and closer to being introduced to the market (e.g., at later stages of “technology readiness levels”). Standards provide technical solutions to problems that are not typically evident in the foundational research phase. Connecting aggregate R&D spending and standards setting is tenuous, especially if directed toward foundational research. However, governments can directly connect government R&D funds with standards development activities via the criteria they use to evaluate R&D grant proposals.
To its credit, this is what the Biden administration has done, but it could go further. The National Science Foundation (NSF)—a major player in allocating government R&D—has made standards development a criteria for assessing R&D proposals to incentivize greater standards participation. This is a step in the right direction; however, it’s one of many criteria, and it’s unclear how much weight NSF will put on it and how they’ll measure and evaluate the standards development activities that grantees undertake. Also, it took years of debate to get this minor mention in NSF criteria, and efforts to embed similar standards criteria in other government funding (such as at the National Institute of Health (NIH)) have failed. The Biden administration should push for this at the NIH, the Department of Energy, and other agencies. Furthermore, if the Department of Defense is so worried about national security and technical standards, why doesn’t it put its money where its mouth is and include similar standards criteria in its R&D funding programs?
Line of Effort 3: Removing and Preventing Barriers to Private Sector Participation in Standards Setting Discussions.
Private sector participation deserves to be a key goal, given that private firms are central actors in developing standards for critical and emerging technologies. However, the strategy does not specify how it will do this. Instead, the strategy points to actions the Biden administration took to correct past missteps on standards. Of note is the Department of Commerce’s slow and lackluster effort to provide a clear and broad exemption for standards-related activities that involve sanctioned firms (namely Huawei). It gave China and Chinese firms an excuse to set up their own duplicative standards (which U.S. firms can’t always participate in) and scared SDOs and standards meetings out of the United States for fear of breaching sanctions laws. This demonstrates why considering technical standards through a distorted and overly powerful national sense lens can be damaging.
The first and easiest thing the Biden administration could have done under this line of effort would have been to clearly emphasize the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) core principles for international standards, which remain important to ensuring open standards processes. It didn’t. The strategy purposely mentioned the principles (transparency, openness, impartiality, and consensus-based discussion-making, among others) without mentioning the WTO. It’s a particularly strange omission given the United States supported explicit references in international forums, such as the G7. NIST (and the U.S. Trade Representative) should make clear that the United States still strongly supports the WTO’s principles on international standards. The WTO principles are a helpful tool to convince countries to keep the international standards system open and effective.
Second, if the Biden administration were serious about supporting the private sector-led standards system, it’d organize with likeminded partners a collective effort to defend its role at the ITU where their involvement is constantly under threat from China, Russia, and others that prefer dealing with governments and no other stakeholders (including both the private sector and civil society).
Third, the strategy mentions it will consider opportunities to host standards meetings in the United States (which makes it easier for U.S. stakeholders to attend and thus influence standards), but it doesn’t mention anything specific. One tangible way would be to push Congress to modify the research and experimentation tax credit to allow international standards-setting costs to qualify as expenditures for the credit. Participating in international standards discussions is costly for companies, especially small- and medium-sized companies. One estimate is that it can cost a company up to $300,000 per year for an engineer to work on international standards. Another tangible way to help increase the number of meetings held in the United States would be to make it easier for the foreign experts working in SDO technical committees to get visas. SDO participants from China and other countries often experience delays and an unpredictable visa application process, leading SDOs to hold meetings in countries with more accessible and predictable visa processes.
Line of Effort 4: Improve Public-Private Communication on Standards.
This is a critical issue for the United States government, as the private sector has far better awareness about what is happening in CET SDOs. Yet, this action item does not include any new information-sharing mechanism or only pays lip service to existing information-sharing mechanisms. For example, there have been cases where U.S. experts were running for election at 3GPP (an important SDO developing standards for mobile telecommunications), and the U.S. government didn’t know or didn’t vote in support. The stark contrast between the U.S. government and the private sector’s level of engagement and participation is made clear when U.S. government officials are not even eligible to vote because they have not participated in past meetings (which is an eligibility requirement to vote).
This line of action appears disingenuous given the lack of genuine engagement and cooperation with the private sector concerning the development of this strategy and the various Biden administration initiatives (e.g., the G7, TTC, and the QUAD). The lack of engagement is self-defeating, given it only undermines the Biden administration’s goals in these forums. The national security apparatus’s distrust and disinterest in the private sector’s views and role is partially offset by the fact that public-private engagement is foundational to NIST. NIST has a long track record of working constructively and productively with the private sector and other representatives on various standards issues. However, NIST’s hands appear somewhat tied given there’s little private sector engagement at the TTC’s working group on standards, which it co-chairs.
NIST and the Department of Commerce should use the CET strategy to develop tools (such as surveys targeted at SDOs involved in certain CETs) to better to understand U.S. and Chinese standards engagement and influence. This would help the U.S. government understand the dynamics of various SDOs, and if there are potentially problematic issues, help the U.S. government start the process to figure out who it needs to talk and work with and what it needs to do (if anything). While this may not work in all forums, such as the ITU, it is more likely to work at private sector-led SDOs.
Line of Effort 5: Enhance U.S. Government and like-minded nations’ representation and influence in international standards of governance and leadership.
The U.S. government’s commendable efforts to get its candidate (Doreen Bogdan-Martin) elected as Secretary-General of the ITU is the clearest example of line of effort 5’s goal. However, it’s unclear what else the United States has done since then. Furthermore, there does not appear to be any additional funding to allow more U.S. government officials to attend standards meetings. At recent ITU meetings, the in-person U.S. delegation was the same size as Saudi Arabia and smaller than Australia’s.
Holding leadership positions at standards bodies helps ensure they are well governed and that no one member/country is subverting them. The ITU deserves special attention as it does not have the same institutional governance arrangements (e.g., open, transparent, and consensus-based decision-making) as other standards bodies, which otherwise act as a safeguard against bad Chinese behavior and proposals. The ITU is so often a focal point for debates about problematic Chinese technical standards proposals—like facial recognition, a state-directed Internet, and deep packet inspection—because it is a government-based body and states set the agenda as opposed to industry-led, multistakeholder SDOs where progress depends on consensus.
An important goal for the United States and partners in securing leadership positions at the ITU is ringfencing its standards agenda as China and others are continuously trying to push the ITU to initiate work on standards topics that do not, and should not, be at the ITU (such as on quantum computing, smart cities, and AI). They do this as, again, the ITU, as a government-membership-based organization, is more amenable to authoritarian governments wanting to take a more state-directed, top-down approach to specifying technical standards.
Line of Effort 7: Deepen standards cooperation with allies and partners to support a robust standards governance process.
Line of effort 7 is a duplicative line of effort 5. The strategy mentions the International Standards Cooperation Network, an emerging working-level mechanism for representatives from like-minded countries around the world to share information about what they’re doing and seeing on standards. This provides a potential foundation for broader cooperation and coordination on standards. However, if U.S. officials are not attending more SDO meetings more often, and there’s limited public-private information sharing, then the utility of this network will be limited as it won’t have much information to share.
A strange omission from this section (and the strategy overall) is that it does not mention that the United States has a small global network of standards attached, even though they are one of the main ways the U.S. government can directly engage in technical standards work and discussions. An easy and overdue step the Biden administration could take would be to revise this attaché network. The U.S. government should revise the network so it has staff in the right countries tracking standards-related developments (e.g., there should not be a standards attaché in Saudi Arabia). The attaché network’s institutional arrangement should be revised to relieve them of multiple lines of reporting at embassies and with various U.S. government agencies. Overall, the attaché network poorly fits within the Department of Commerce’s Foreign Commercial Service (FCS), whose staff work on very different issues. The metrics FCS uses in performance reviews are very different from what standards attach work on, which makes it difficult to retain and develop a cadre of experts as career progression is so difficult within the current structure.
Conclusion: The strategy has many shortfalls, but hopefully, NIST can save it via implementation.
It’s rare for the White House to mention technical standards, so the fact that the Biden Administration has focused on it is encouraging. The strategy rightly recognizes the change in the strategic importance of technical standards and that there is a clear role for the U.S. government and its like-minded trading partners to be more aware of what is happening and coordinate how best to respond. However, while the strategy includes some good points, these are undermined by several flaws and omissions. The good points also suffer from a lack of new ideas, tangible action, and resources. There’s also an undercurrent in the strategy that Biden’s national security officials simply do not understand that technical standards setting is not a government-directed process.
The U.S. government plays a minor role in setting technical standards for CETs. The level of expertise in the private sector will always be orders of magnitude greater than what any government will have on its own. The sooner the Biden administration recognizes this and establishes mechanisms for meaningful engagement and cooperation (and support for) the private sector, the better it’ll do regarding CET standards. Ultimately, the strategy’s impact depends on NIST as the agency responsible for its implementation. NIST embodies a long-standing commitment to working constructively with the private sector in highly technical and cooperative ways, which it’ll need to do a lot to make the strategy successful.
