Sean Garrett over at the 463 blog has a good summary of the TPS interview of Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz yesterday. Walt Mossberg proved to be a great interviewer (as you would expect) and the discussion ranged across a lot of issues, including broadband policy and the greening of IT.

The one area where Mr. Schwartz provided some interesting commentary was on broadband policy. When asked whether the US should have a government broadband policy, Schwartz argued that government should not get involved in mandating technology. Yet, in the same breath, he said that governments should focus on setting standards (i.e. the ODF-only policies that IBM and to a lesser extent Sun have been pushing around the world).

He would probably defend this obvious contradiction in logic by suggesting that governments have a traditional role in standards setting. There is some truth to that, but in today’s world it is increasingly problematic. Rather than look at it from the perspective of the ongoing ODF v OpenXML battle, let’s look at the precedent we’re setting globally.

If it is OK for the United States government to interfere in the standards setting process, other governments will continue to follow suit. For a nightmare scenario, just look at how China is trying to use government standards setting for WLAN technology for the purposes of base protectionism and industrial espionage. As Government Technology describes it:

WAPI became a subject of controversy in 2003 when Chinese government selected this home-grown technology and controlled by its local companies as its national standard for WLAN and mandated that all WLAN equipment sold in China be WAPI-complaint as of December that year.

This not only meant that all 802.11-compliant equipment without WAPI couldn’t be sold in China, but to be able to be WAPI-complaint, international vendors had to partner with government-selected Chinese companies for accessing the secret WAPI block cipher thereby revealing their products to IPR and business risks.

The battle between standards (like ODF v. OpenXML) is best left to the marketplace. The price of government intervention is simply getting too high.