The European Union may not be the world leader in the provision of some of the latest technological advances of our era — like artificial intelligence or 5G — but it still wants to have a say in setting international standards. For this purpose, the EU launched a Standardization Strategy on February 2 aimed at strengthening the EU´s position in global standard-setting for technology applications.
Standards help manufacturers ensure the interoperability of products and services, reduce costs, improve safety and foster innovation. The EU has always had an important role in setting international standards — but in this report, it acknowledged that Europe may lose its influence in some areas if it doesn’t act now, given an increasingly competitive global context where many countries are taking a strong stance about standardization.
China is one of the countries that has announced its intentions to invest more resources to have a more influential role in international standard-setting for new technologies like 5G and Artificial Intelligence. These renewed international efforts by China raised some red flags among policymakers in Europe and the U.S.
This Standardization Strategy is the first EU response to this threat.
“Technical standards are of strategic importance. Europe’s technological sovereignty, ability to reduce dependencies and protection of EU values will rely on our ability to be a global standard-setter. With today’s Strategy, we are crystal-clear on our standardization priorities and create the conditions for European standards to become global benchmarks,” said Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for the Internal Market.
Europe wants to be more assertive and strategic in international standard-setting. To achieve this purpose, it plans to create a high-level forum with representatives of member states, European standardization organizations and national standardization bodies, industry, civil society and academia to help set priorities, advise on future standardization needs and coordinate effective representation of European interests in (international) standardization fora.
The areas that the EU may prioritize include a wide range of sectors like vaccine and medicine production, hydrogen and low-carbon cement. But two areas that stand above the rest are the certification of chips — in terms of security, authenticity and reliability — and certification and data standards, given their key role for the development of the Common European Data Space.
“Ensuring that data is protected in artificial intelligence or ensuring that mobile devices are secure from hacking relies on standards and must be in line with EU democratic values. In the same way, we need standards for the roll-out of important investment projects, like hydrogen or batteries, and to valorized innovation investment by providing EU companies with an important first-mover advantage,” said Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age.
Read More: EU Parliament Committee Urges Member States to Design a Roadmap for AI
While most of the actions in the EU strategy seek to raise awareness among top leaders in Member States and to increase cooperation with “like-minded partners” to have more influence in international fora, probably the proposal that will have a direct and long-term effect is the modification of the EU Regulation on standardization.
The EU is proposing to change the rules on how standards are adopted. The current EU standard-setting gives, according to the European Commission, too much weight to large companies — in many cases, from non-EU countries — inside some industry-led standard-setting organization. The EU´s proposal will require national delegates and national standardization bodies to handle the requests for new standards. It is yet unclear if this new mandate will apply to all sectors or just to key areas. The amendments to the law will also seek to increase the participation of small and medium enterprises and civil society in the standard setting bodies.
This dual approach of avoiding undue influence of actors from outside the EU in the EU standard-setting process and to increase efforts at a political level to have more influence in setting global standards will, in view of the commission, give the EU and EU companies an important first-mover advantage.
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