Vulnerabilities of European telecommunication systems and the EU’s concerns about ETSI’s legitimacy–a proposal for value-based standardization

Abstract

Telecommunication systems can only function properly with standards that ensure interoperability. Consequently, these standards shape the systems. However, the European Commission (EC) is concerned that foreign (e.g. Chinese) companies are influencing and shaping European telecommunications through their participation in committees of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The EC wants ETSI to ban non-European firms from co-deciding about critical standards. This paper discusses the EC’s concerns by examining ETSI’s practices from a historical perspective and discussing the concept of legitimacy. Our findings demonstrate that this ban is unsuitable for reaching the EC’s objectives. We develop an alternative by separating decisions about standards to be used in Europe from ETSI’s standard development process. This way, ETSI can continue to involve companies from China and other countries outside Europe, but there will be an additional step for acceptance of telecommunications standards: Europeans will decide which standards to adopt, using value-based criteria. This approach would address the EC’s concerns much better than the solutions they originally envisioned, while still allowing ETSI to maintain its global relevance. This approach is novel in the literature on standardization. Moreover, this study shows that combining the different forms of legitimacy provides a more comprehensive framework for analyzing standardization.