Last week, we put out a statement on the European Commission’s most recent draft of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), which is focused on the noble goal of improving data sharing between national governments and the European Union itself.  It was quoted in a story about the EIF by IP-Watch and our friend in the Tin Foil Hat.

The gist of our response was:

“The EU scores an own goal with this document. It aims to facilitate digital cooperation among European administrations, but in effect it excludes many well-established technologies from being used for e-Government services due to a narrow definition of open standards. This will hurt first and foremost innovative tech start-ups that rely on patent protection to establish themselves in the marketplace.”

The problem with the new direction of the EIF is that it requires the use of only “open standards,” whose definition has been distorted to ONLY mean royalty free standards – a definition that is at odds with the definition provide by the vast majority of standards bodies.  To give you a sense of the policy’s absurdity, depending on its implementation, the governments of Europe would likely have to give up communicating via GSM phones, stop producing DVDs, and give up using WiFi networks.  Obviously a brilliant way to ensure BETTER interoperability between governments and their citizens.

Yet, the folks at the FFII made this rather bewildering argument in response to Joff Wild’s blog on the subject:

As a citizen, I should not be forced to pay anybody just to talk to my government. And if the government forces the use of royalty bearing IT standards to communicate with them, that’s the citizens that pays at the end.

That is some really grand rhetoric from our friends at the FFII, too bad it is a completely bogus argument in reality.  We nearly ALWAYS pay something to talk to our government:

  • If you are a writing a letter to the government (and are not a complete scofflaw) you must buy the paper, the envelope, the pen, and the stamp with which to send it all.
  • If you pick up your GSM phone to call the government, that cost of the equipment and services are paid in some way by you the citizen, and that includes all the patent royalties tied up in the GSM standard.
  • Even if you decide to walk into the government offices, you either need to pay for the overpriced gas to get you there (not to mention the various patent royalties that go into the cost of your car) or bus fare.

That’s the problem with all this grand rhetoric around “open standards,” it all sounds fantastic until you look at what it means in the real world.  That’s what seems to have happened in Denmark, which decided unceremoniously to postpone its equally ridiculous plan to move to all open, royalty free standards this year.