Part 2. Standards learn a neat trick: communication
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With the rise of the post-war information and communications era, a new
kind of standard emerged, one that would ensure the inter-operation of
technologies from different countries. Ken Krechmer, Fellow at the
International Center for Standards Research University of Colorado at
Boulder, calls this a "compatibility standard". [For Ken's excellent
model describing the evolution of standards, go to:
http://www.csrstds.com/siit.html]

If you were going to call France from the United States, the person on
the the other end should be able to dial your number, hear you and speak
to you. Technology standards enabled global commerce, but they were seen
by the companies that manufactured such technologies as an opportunity
to make money: they were perfectly willing to turn their proprietary
systems into a publicly available way of doing business - for a fee.
That's how monopolies are created of course, and every dominant company
in the ITC industry is guilty of wanting to be one and succeeding to
some degree.

One way around these monopolies was to make standards more of a public
object, which is how "de jure", or "legally mandated" standards bodies
were created. In time, nations sent civil servants and engineers to
places like ISO, which was established in 1947, to solve international
interoperability problems; or nationally, places like AFNOR in France,
DIN in Germany, BSI in the UK, ANSI in the US to agree on that minimum
which needed to be known and shared for things to work together.

Such standards were seen by private companies as a necessary evil, and
as the unwanted step-child of the patent. With patents you could
innovate and get paid for it; you could dominate markets with
inventions, and you would guard these trade secrets with your life. With
standards, you had to disclose at least a portion of the inner workings
of your products, and the only reason you would do this would be to
avoid the chaos of incompatible technologies - the Baltimore fire all
over again. But doing business with governments also made money, so
complying with government-mandated standards turned into a nice little
habit. In any case, compliance, while cumbersome, was not any skin off
of anyone's nose, because it didn't require that secrets be given away
or that patent revenue be foregone. One consequence of the rise of the
de jure bodies was the urge private companies felt in the 70s and 80s to
form their own trade associations or consortia as a counterweight. Such
"de facto" organizations introduced a culture of wary cooperation
between mostly hardware manufacturers - like so many gentleman's clubs
where club members politely played gin rummy together. Of course, any
game played in these ad hoc clubs had to emulate the rules that
prevailed in the marketplace, namely a desire to be paid for one's
patent. Which is why most of the standards devised by these ad hoc
bodies recognized one and only one kind of intellectual property rights:
the "reasonable" sort. What reasonable meant at the time is that the
gentlemen's standards club would charge whatever it deemed the market
could reasonably bear for its standards. Later, the reasonable was
augmented by "and non-discriminatory", as a nod to anti-trust
legislation, although no one was ever able to figure out how not to
discriminate against newer entrants. Reasonable and non-discriminatory,
or RAND, remains as of this writing the dominant IPR mode in most
hardware standards bodies. We shall return to this critical point a
little later. For now, we can move along without further ado.