Cory: Excluding China from Tech Standards-Setting Could Mean New Trade Barriers
U.S. efforts to reduce China’s participation in standard-setting for critical and emerging technologies over national security concerns are “misguided” and self-defeating – and could lead to higher technical barriers to trade, a trade policy researcher at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation tells Inside U.S. Trade.
Nigel Cory, associate director for trade policy at ITIF, a think tank focused on technology policy, said in an interview this week that increased Chinese participation in international standards-setting had prompted a shift in the U.S. approach, causing officials to pursue national security aims over trade, competitiveness and innovation. But Cory warned that any U.S. move to exclude China from standards-setting processes amid escalating technological confrontation would be “counterproductive and misguided” and undermine U.S. tech leadership.
If China is excluded from standard-setting discussions and begins developing its own technical standards, it “essentially fragments this international system that allows firms to use one standard to provide products and services around the world; and the next thing, U.S. firms start having to adapt their products and services for not just a U.S. standard, but a Chinese standard, and then ultimately, potentially a European standard,” he said.
Such a diffusion of technological standards would mean new costs for companies and could lead to interoperability issues that spell new barriers to global trade, Cory contended.
