This is beautifully written and frames the issue in a fresh way for me. I'm taking away an appeal to individuals and business entities to intentionally optimize for economic public good as opposed to profit and that to contribute to international standardization efforts is one practical way to pledge to that goal.

This is a rosy view of standards that ignores how often they are perverted for rent seeking.

It's funny to me that a piece like this is as likely to polarize people away from standards as towards it, since the case it's making is essentially orthogonal to the most salient debate about standards.

Well written article and very thought provoking!

The more universal a need is, the less it should be supplied by capitalism.

Education; healthcare: universal needs. When left to the private sector, prices explode and exploitation reigns. Because no matter the price, people will pay.

Las Vegas’ strip on the other hand, needs no government intervention. Folks there are spending money they can live without!

American culture worships the market as solver of all problems - which it is while there’s still growth. But when things settle in, standards allow new players to keep incumbents honest.

Regarding standards, neat that the “standard” for C is ANSI C. It calls back to a time when standards bodies were key to technology development. It predates even IBM’s XT and AT PC - a transition away from standards-bodies-driven hardware development toward market-leader driven.

Ultimately the universality of standards and ability for new players should always be maintained in every market - it should never be impossible to disrupt lazy incumbents. Standards are crucial to keeping markets and industries healthy.

Soooo how we doing over in social media?

If I were King of America, the first thing I'd do is start enforcing standard protocols for things like auth, messaging, data export/migration, etc. Mostly relying on industry to decide _what_ the protocols should be, but making sure everyone adheres to them.

Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.

I'd agree with non-capitalist, but the authors are far too absolute for my liking.

The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.

At this point, it's basically the standard example.

The thing 'anti-capitalists' never seem to understand, is that it's not a top down system but bottom up emergent human behaviour. A function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit. Thus hard to see an "end to capitalism". That would be like an end to language. We'd just re-invent it.

I don't really understand this article. The authors don't seem interested in the details of either capitalism or standards development organizations. Just because they're nonprofit doesn't mean they're outside of the market economy! (ANSI must have forgotten about their purported commitment to "information sharing for free or nearly free" when they started charging $2500 for the complete 2023 SQL standard.)

You don't need an anti-capitalist case for standards. The capitalist case for standards is that you don't want firms to succeed though manipulation of the market because it keeps them from competing in productive ways (i.e improving product or process.)

Energy that companies spend on dirty tricks and dirty trick defense is waste, and makes us all poorer. But you can't expect any particular firm to unilaterally give up an incompatibility moat, unless all of them do. Government stepping in to set standards is solving a collective action problem.

And standards can also be bullshit. No mention of the OOXML debacle.

"And so we return to where we started: the difficulty of imagining an end to capitalism. We do not claim to have a solution to that particular problem"

It's pretty funny to see such a blatantly biased article coming out of academia. Oh wait.

Meanwhile, I'll save my paychecks to buy the texts of some of those anti-capitalist produced standards.

In other actual anti-capitalist news, the NIH says we shouldn't have to pay twice for government sponsored research.

https://deepnewz.com/us-domestic-policy/nih-to-end-paywalls-...

Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good. They mostly help large companies to monopolize large markets. Without standards, there would be a patchwork of companies catering to different communities. It would create a lot of work opportunities, lots of competition and there would be adapters to bridge between different interfaces. It would be more hassle but it would improve everyone's work life 100x and would probably result in faster technological progress as more people would be able to have capital to innovate, in a more flexible self-directed way.