Under the heading “let me just assert this and maybe people will believe it,” I keep hearing this argument about “open standards” being the metaphorical cure for cancer in the IT sector.

Of course, no one is really sure what they mean when they come out with this rhetoric. In Denmark, the Parliament passed a law that procurement would be restricted to “open standards” that have no cost, but the government is having a little trouble implementing it because it could mean that everyone would have to stop using their GSM phones and WiFi hotspots.

Here at the IGF conference in Athens, open standards, according to moderator Ken Cukier, are the secret sauce to solving the internet’s security problems. Panelists Gus Hosien and Richard Simpson had the sense to say that an “open approach” makes sense, but that no governance group should pick winners in the competing standards arena. Of course, any standards-setting body would work far too slowly to respond to new security threats that arise on Internet time.

And the ‘Open Standards solves everything, including poor dental hygene’ folks tried to convolute this to say that only CERTAIN open standards deserve love. During one presentation, Jamie Love attempted to suggest that there is no monopoly product in the web page creation market because HTML is a standard – therefore we should support ODF, the document format being flacked by IBM and Sun instead of the OpenXML standard being proposed by Microsoft and Apple. But if they are both open standards, how does supporting one of them to the point of monopoly cure your imaginary problems with the other open standard? This one just makes your head hurt.

First of all, it’s not like HTML originated from some discussion at a standards body. In fact, let’s look at what Wiki has to say about it:

“Tim Berners-Lee created the original HTML (and many of the associated protocols such as HTTP) on a NeXTcube workstation using the NeXTSTEP development environment. At the time, HTML was not a specification, but a collection of tools to solve an immediate problem: the communication and dissemination of ongoing research among Berners-Lee and a group of his colleagues. His solution later combined with the emerging international and public internet to garner worldwide attention.”

Now, if we fast-forward to 2006 we see that the w3c could not come close to keeping up with what was going on in the marketplace with CSS, Java and everything else. You simply had free market innovation taking place and everyone was trying everything and that’s how it’s supposed to happen. Ultimately, standards bodies do help to create some level of “floor” but they sure as hell never push for the ceiling.

I suppose I can put “open” in front of just about anything and I’ll get some easy allies.