On 6 October, the European Commission presented its proposal for a new EU regulation on standardization. The objectives are to make standards supporting EU legislation and policies available sooner, broaden access to standards and strengthen the Union’s influence in international fora. CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, the three European standardization organizations, would remain at the center of system, but with greater oversight and the possibility for the Commission to use alternative routes when the process in place cannot meet the required quality or deadlines.

The initial reactions are more a disagreement over the means than over the objectives. The Commission wants a more reliable, open and transparent system. On their side, standards bodies want to preserve the conditions that make voluntary standardization possible: consensus, expertise, institutional stability and sustainable funding.

These concerns are valid. But will this proposal mainly help Europe put its policies into practice, or will it also help Europe build the industrial strength needed to compete with other blocs in a context of geopolitical and geoeconomic competition?

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This Monday 28 September 2026, delegates from more than 170 countries will get together in Paris for ISO’s 2026 Annual Meeting. The City of Light (“La Ville Lumière”) has a particular place in ISO’s history. Indeed, it is in Paris in 1949 at the great amphitheatre of the Sorbonne that ISO’s very first General Assembly took place. The event was organized by AFNOR under the leadership of its Director General Raymond Frontard, with French President Vincent Auriol and UNESCO’s Director General Jaime Torres-Bodet participating1.

Seventy-seven years later, ISO returns to the city where it started to speak with one voice, in a year AFNOR itself celebrates its 100th anniversary, and in a very different global context.

Indeed in 1949, international standardization was a small, hopeful instrument of postwar reconstruction, the technical component to the newly built system of international institutions of the United Nations and Bretton Woods. In 2026, ISO is back to Paris as one of the last functioning pieces of the multilateral system, an organization still capable of getting China, Europe, the United States and more than a hundred developing economies to sit at the same table and agree on something concrete. An admirable achievement but one which is at risk.

The (extremely) underestimated importance of ISO

For about three decades, international standardization supported the Marrakesh Agreement that, in 1994, created the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the implementation of the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement2 that followed a year later. It allowed a bolt made in Ohio fit a fixture made in Osaka, a quality management system certified in Sao Paulo be recognized in Stuttgart or a safety test run in Nairobi validated in Rotterdam.

Since its founding in 1947, ISO has helped translate technical cooperation into huge, tangible gains for people’s everyday lives: safer products, safer workplaces, more reliable food and healthcare systems, cleaner environments, greater consumer protection worldwide. By giving countries a common language, ISO standards have lowered trade barriers and transaction costs, fueling economic growth and job creation while helping developing economies access global markets and narrow the gap with wealthier nations.

As such, ISO standards have been, much too quietly, one of the fundamental enabling infrastructures of shared prosperity, supporting public health, environmental protection, and the reduction of poverty as much as industrial efficiency.

Standardization under pressure

The international order established after the Second World War is showing signs of unraveling.

Trade is fragmenting along bloc lines, protectionism and non-tariff barriers are multiplying (see Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization). Standardization, long considered as apolitical, has become an explicit arena of great-power competition. Some governments now treat standards strategy as a matter of national security and sovereignty (see Is it the end of the “One standard, one test, accepted everywhere” dream?). Others build parallel, opaque standard-setting arrangements outside ISO and IEC altogether, a kind of “shadow standardization” that answers to no one but its sponsors (see When standards go parallel).

None of this happened overnight but in 2026, at the precise moment where ISO’s Annual Meeting is taking place, this is something that is impossible to ignore.

ISO, a resilient organization

ISO’s entire value proposition is based on a function that nothing else, no bloc, no pluri- or bilateral agreement, and no private consortium, can replicate. It is the only place where adversarial countries still negotiate as equals over something that actually gets built, distributed, and used.

Historically, this function has survived the decolonization movement in the 1960s, the Cold War, the fall of USSR with direct substantial consequences on the membership and funding of ISO, China’s opening in 1978 and its rise to the ISO presidency by 2015, and the entry of the Global South into a majority position among ISO’s own membership.

Each of these events could have fractured the system. But none of them did, because the organization's members kept returning to the same principle: technical consensus is worth protecting even when political consensus is nonexistent.

Why Paris is key

This argument needs to be made loudly in Paris this year. Not as nostalgia for the age of “happy globalization” and frictionless trade, but as a deliberate choice about what to preserve while everything else is renegotiated.

The stakes are high. There is a significant risk that the economic, environmental and societal progresses to which ISO has strongly contributed are wiped out. It is important to remember that the moment international standards become just another battlefield for geopolitical leverage, the very efficiencies that they made possible will start to unwind, quietly and unevenly, with developing economies paying the first and highest price.

What ISO’s founders in 1946 and 1949 built endured not because it avoided politics, but because it refused to let politics dictate the content of standards. This is the discipline that Paris 2026 has to protect.

Building trust

The theme chosen for this year’s meeting, “Building trust in a changing world”, couldn’t be more relevant. It is a direct answer to the fragmentation that is now visible everywhere else in the international system.

As Swiss President Guy Parmelin explained this week in his address to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, “Trust is built when the rules offer everyone a genuine opportunity to participate. It is also built when states continue to engage in dialogue”3.

If rules are what build trust, then who gets to shape them matters as much as the rules themselves. For ISO, concretely, this means ensuring:

• That a genuine opportunity is given to all countries, including developing economies, to equally lead and contribute to the discussions and work at the ISO General Assembly, Council and governance groups, even if this calls for a redistribution of power and roles.

• That the standards development process is not just said to be opened to everyone, but that each country or stakeholder interested in contributing, including SMEs, consumers, NGOs and other public society representatives, can actually sit at the table and can be heard.

• That this same standards development process is capable of promptly responding to today’s stakeholders' needs.

• That the new technologies and platforms currently deployed to write standards and to distribute their content also benefit the least advanced countries, not just a small group of privileged ones, and that every possible effort is made to decrease the gap that exists today between advanced and developing economies.

• That new, open, simple and easy to understand copyright and commercial policies and strategies are deployed to make standards broadly and easily accessible to all users worldwide.

• That regional organizations like ARSO, ASEAN, COPANT, GSO or RNF, in addition to CEN, are actively and equally supported as these organizations help build trust.

If ISO can leave Paris having reaffirmed that a standard is still something built together rather than imposed by the strongest group in the room, it will have done more for the multilateral order than most diplomatic summits held in recent years. If it cannot, the risk is not that ISO disappears, it is that it will slowly stop mattering, with decisions taken elsewhere, faster and with far less representativity and accountability. Seventy-seven years after the Sorbonne, Paris is the opportunity to remind the world what that discipline looks like in practice.

I wish all my former ISO colleagues and friends in National Standards Bodies a very successful Paris meeting!

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ISO’s 2025 financial results, published recently on the organization’s website, are encouraging. The ISO Central Secretariat (ISO/CS) restored an operating surplus in 2025, primarily through financial discipline.

At the same time, the figures reinforce several arguments I made in Reflections on business model innovation in standardization. The key question remains: how can a standards body capture value when the value of standards increasingly resides not in the document itself, but in how standards are used?

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The CEO of a technology multinational company made an interesting point in an article published by McKinsey. For him, maintaining separate legal entities is no longer enough to preserve market access:

“It’s about having a completely different tech stack to comply with local regulations. The cost of doing business globally has just gone through the roof.”

In the same article, the leader of a European consumer-goods company explained that diverging standards had doubled or tripled the company’s technology costs.

Recently a report from the Hinrich Foundation warns that politicisation of semiconductors could split the industry into isolated geopolitical spheres, with competing standards and conflicting US–China regulation.

In my previous article Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization, I developed three possible geopolitical scenarios for standardization. The first scenario is managed pluralism, where major blocs keep essential economic and technical ties despite building higher walls. International standards still matter but they now share the space with stronger regional rules and private consortia. The second is hard fragmentation and digital decoupling. This is the escalation phase. Blocs build entirely separate tech infrastructures and compliance silos, forcing companies to adapt products, certifications, and compliance processes for each market. Finally, collaborative competition, where governments realize that major, systemic crises like climate change or cybersecurity require cross-border tools, using international standards as political stabilizers.

Taken together, the examples in the McKinsey article and the warning in the Hinrich Foundation’s report look increasingly like the second scenario, hard fragmentation, a direction already taken in strategically sensitive domains.

What does this shift from global interoperability to parallel technical and compliance ecosystems mean for companies, and what must standards bodies do to prevent voluntary standards from becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution?

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For many, the crisis in Ceuta was seen as the collapse of European unity. Tens of thousands of migrants arrived on the Spanish territory in a single day. Italy said it would suspend its Schengen arrangement with Spain and called for the country’s broader suspension from the zone. Denmark and Finland backed the demand, and the escalation culminated when twenty-two leaders of EU countries signed a letter criticizing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s migration policies for undermining the security of the bloc’s external borders.1

Reading the comments, I thought: has such a thing as European unity really ever existed? What about standardization?

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Last month, at the CEN and CENELEC General Assemblies in Agia Napa, Cyprus, (better known for crystal‑clear water, beautiful beaches and nightlife than for institutional advances), members of the two organizations signed the Cyprus Commitment, a shared agreement to modernize the European Standardization System.

The moment of the signature was widely promoted on social networks:

If you’ve been following The Unstandardized, you already know my perspective on what CEN and CENELEC previously described as a “bold new value proposition” in a LinkedIn post:

• European standardization and the illusion of invisible power.

Now, does this agreement brings clarity around?

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For decades, the global standardization system rested on a relatively clear understanding of what is considered an “international standard”. Under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement, international standards should follow six core principles: transparency, openness, impartiality and consensus, effectiveness and relevance, coherence, and a development dimension. If you’ve been following me, you will have read how ISO, IEC and ITU, all located in Geneva, became the main organizations seen as consistently operating under these principles and providing the technical backbone for global trade:

• Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization.

In recent years, this landscape has started to shift, with technical standards increasingly used as tools of foreign policy and strategic competition. States, alone or grouped in the form of economic or political blocs, are now building and empowering parallel architectures for standards development that coexist with, and sometimes bypass, the three Geneva‑based institutions. This is what I call “strategic parallel standardization”, a concept that this article develops and uses to examine its implications for the international standardization system.

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Dear Readers,

I am now back to Geneva after four months in Mexico City. Here is a new edition of The Unstandardized Digest:

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Dear Readers of The Unstandardized,

Here is a new selection of news, articles, videos or podcasts that came to my attention recently:

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Business model innovation and digital transformation are occupying a large part of the discussions in standards bodies, with various projects around these issues currently being deployed.

At international level, ISO and IEC are pursuing their SMART Standards programme, which aims to deliver machine‑readable, interoperable standards and to explore new business models for their distribution.

In the United States, SAE International has established the Digital Standards Alliance (DSA) under SAE ITC to “accelerate the integration and use of digital standards across the entire product development lifecycle” and to coordinate the standards industry’s digital transformation around common use cases and services.

In Europe, CEN and CENELEC, two of the three European Standards Organizations recognised under Regulation 1025/20121, recently announced a new value proposition to “move away from a traditional, document‑led model and towards a dynamic model centred around added‑value digital standardization services” (see my previous article European standardization and the illusion of invisible power).

Initiatives described as “digital transformation” in standards bodies are not new. In the 1980s, ISO launched a project to publish its standards in SGML, already with machine‑readable ambitions for its standards, before being abandoned a few years later. In the mid‑1990s, most standards bodies successfully converted their standards from print to PDF, mostly through scanning, enabling the sale of standards via online stores. At the same time, offset printing was progressively replaced by digital, print‑on‑demand workflows, resulting in substantial gains in efficiency. Then came the early twenty‑first century and, somewhat paradoxically, almost a full decade of inertia. It took indeed until 2011 for ISO to relaunch an XML project that was dormant, and to reopen the conversation on structured, reusable standards content. Since then, announcements about “digital transformation” have multiplied, especially around SMART Standards, a major initiative launched in 2021 following the recommendations of ISO’s Technical Management Board Strategic Advisory Group on Machine Readable Standards (ISO/TMB SAG MRS).

If the promise of transformation is everywhere in the communications, its effects on how standards bodies create, deliver and capture value are much harder to see. Despite all this activity and projects, no genuinely “disruptive”, high‑value products or services have emerged at scale, and the underlying business models of standards bodies remain variations of the sale and licensing of their documents.

This article explores why, despite multiple waves of digital initiatives and substantial investments, standards bodies are still struggling to achieve genuine business model innovation, seem to go round in circles, and what they can realistically do about it. To summarize, the high‑level view is that the main obstacles are not technical but conceptual, cultural, structural and political. The current fascination with “digital standards” often hides the real questions, particularly on the fundamental dynamics of why standards are developed and bought, and how they are used, two aspects that remain widely misunderstood.

The argument will develop over ten parts:

• Part 1 - The unbearable pressure: The current pressure on standards bodies and their funding, including calls for free access to standards, legal challenges around standards referenced in legislation, reduction in public subsidies, and geopolitical tensions.

• Part 2 - The struggles: How standards bodies have responded so far, mostly through digital publishing projects, and why many initiatives failed to deliver the expected impact or return on investment.

• Part 3 - The business model confusion: How the lack of clarity around the concept of “business model” leads to poor strategic choices.

• Part 4 - History of standards sales: How standards sales emerged and became central to funding of several standards bodies, and why this configuration is path‑dependent rather than the product of deliberate design.

• Part 5 - Market (mis)understanding: The economic nature of standards as products, and how misreading the demand has led to chronic misalignment between standards bodies and their markets.

• Part 6 - The obsession with digital transformation: How the pressure to “digitalize everything” has turned digital transformation into a mantra, often reduced to tooling and formats.

• Part 7 - When inspiration comes from the wrong benchmark: Why analogies with the music industry and autonomous driving are poor templates for standardization and costly strategic diversions.

• Part 8 - Other barriers to business model innovation: Internal blockers that make transformation so difficult.

• Part 9 - Where we are now: A system that is technologically more sophisticated but financially fragile and strategically hesitant.

• Part 10 - Recommendations: Directions for standards bodies that really want to move towards business models and strategies that are both sustainable and compatible with their public‑interest missions.

So, let’s dive in!

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Europe is reforming how it sells standards while the rest of the world is competing to own them. This contrast finds its most visible expression in a single phrase from a post published this week on LinkedIn by CEN and CENELEC1:

Standards to “remain the trusted, invisible engine of the Single Market”: this is a striking image, and a deeply revealing one. As the United States is leveraging bilateral trade deals to redraw the rules of international standardization, and as China consistently executes its strategy to lead the technical bodies that define the technologies of tomorrow, Europe’s response is not to change, to transition from documents to digital services, and to embrace invisibility as a guiding aspiration.

Is this a vision? Or is it a concession dressed in the language of transformation?

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The world order as we know it since the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is now behind us. The period of “Happy Globalization”, as economists and think tanks now like to describe it, going roughly from the early 1980s to around 2010, was based on three main pillars:

• A belief in the liberalization of trade and investments.

• The delegation of technical rule‑making to private and semi‑private standards and regulatory bodies.

• The use of international standards as the primary technical infrastructure for integrating markets and reducing regulatory friction.

During that period, voluntary, consensus-based standardization created immense public value. Today the world is fragmented and the standardization ecosystem is under growing structural pressure driven by geopolitical forces. In this article, I will explore the profound changes that are reshaping standardization, develop potential future scenarios, and present strategies that standards bodies can adopt to survive and remain influential.

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Dear Readers,

Back to The Unstandardized after a few weeks of travels. I am now in Mexico City for the next four months and will be attending Accuris SPAB meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the end of February, where I will speak about standards and geopolitics. In the meantime, here is a new selection of news, …

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently:

About standards users

IFAN, the International Federation of Standards Users, has published in October its standards users survey. This …

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently:

About international organizations’ funding

International organizations in Geneva are facing major challenges due to substantial decreas…

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently while I am writing my next essay for The Unstandardized:

From standards organizations

• IEC Annual Report 2024

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently.

About standards bodies’ business models

A number of US Standards Development Organizations (SDO) have formally opposed the Pro Codes Act

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently.

Events to come

• IFAN Webinar - Navigating the AI Landscape: Impacts and opportunities for standards users

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Last week U.S. court ruling in a case involving the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, affirming that the use of books to train its AI model Claude is fair use and transformative1, is not a good news for standards bodies. The decision comes at the moment where these bodies are developing policies so that they can keep the exclusive use of the content in their standards to train, in the future, their own AI models. The verdict directly undermines such plans as any AI generative system can now ingest and repurpose technical content without licensing or compensation, as long as the material has been legally acquired.

The Anthropic ruling compounds the impact of the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) decision on 5 March 2024 requiring free public access to harmonized standards referenced in EU law, with the argument that public interest outweighs the protection of commercial interests of standards bodies. While it is hoped that the mandate for free access to standards in Europe can be contained to the continent and is not going to produce a domino effect, another front is now opening in the United States that is compromising the objectives of standards bodies to add value to the content in standards, and develop new revenues streams through technology.

This combination accelerates the existential threat to the revenues that standards bodies directly derive from the sales of standards. Let’s see why a fundamental shift of mindset, from the defensive copyright policies followed so far to an open exploitation of the content in standards, is not just advisable but critical for the survival of several standards bodies, and how such a shift can be provoked.

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At the recent G7 Summit in Canada, a landmark moment unfolded as the United Kingdom and the United States formally signed the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal (EPD)1 first announced in May. While media coverage focused on the incident involving the physical handling of the agreement, the true significance of the EPD has largely escaped notice, particularly within the standardization community. Which is unfortunate as the EPD contains provisions2 that can fundamentally reshape the global standardization landscape and redefine the roles of established multilateral, voluntary standards development organizations. Let’s examine the key elements of the deal and discuss the possible far-reaching implications for international standardization.

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