Small Yards, Big Tents: A Study by Cameron Kerry.
In this special edition of the CAVEAT newsletter, we are going to be taking a deeper look into Cameron Kerry’s new publication, Small Yards, Big Tents: How to Build Cooperation on Critical International Standards. Cameron Kerry, a distinguished fellow with the Brookings Institution, focuses on researching emerging technologies and the debate surrounding privacy. While CAVEAT has already briefly reviewed this publication in our weekly newsletter and podcast last week, this special edition is going to closely analyze Kerry’s work expanding upon the previous discussions as well as giving more insight into the subject.
The Publication.
To briefly contextualize Kerry’s recent publication, Kerry’s work examines the current state of international standards creation and what steps can be taken to improve these processes to better address and handle emerging technologies. Kerry starts this publication by examining how major nations, including the United States (US), European Union (EU), and China, currently approach standards development. Despite the US taking an industry-led approach, the EU taking a multi-stakeholder approach, and China taking a state-drive approach, Kerry discusses how each of these approaches and strategies functionally relies upon international engagement.
These international engagement opportunities typically come through bilateral and multilateral initiatives including the G7 conference, the US-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC), or through special summits, like the United Kingdom’s Safety Summit in 2023. This summit was driven by a global need to begin researching artificial intelligence (AI) safety. These various international meetings have already laid the groundwork for a strong foundation for international cooperation, as summits, like the TTC, have led to the creation and adoption of agreements on terminology, comparisons for risk assessment approaches, and the creation of a code of conduct for AI.
However, despite this current foundation, there is room to improve. Throughout this paper, Kerry further examines the international standards development process discussing how major governments need to better balance their roles as they approach emerging technology standards. Kerry argues how governments need to work in tandem with existing Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) moving forward. Kerry stresses that these SDOs have valuable processes, like wide participation, and filtering of unsound standard proposals, that should be preserved as governments seek greater international cooperation. Additionally, Kerry emphasizes that governments must identify their needs for new standards, especially within the US, to ensure that they can work with stakeholders on how to meet these needs appropriately.
Aside from maintaining current strengths in our system, Kerry also strongly advocates for these major governments to exercise restraint, especially within the US and EU, to avoid a “standardization arms race.” For example, Kerry highlights how previously both the US and EU have negatively reacted to China’s growing involvement in standards. Kerry references how previously China has attempted to “game” the standards development system by introducing subpar standards that would have benefited their technologies. However, despite China’s “gaming” attempts, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful. Due to these ineffective attempts, Kerry stresses that governments, like the US and EU, should not overreact to these efforts and should instead encourage greater participation for China in SDOs. Kerry highlights how including China in SDO efforts has often been productive rather than reductive to standards development.
Kerry ends his paper by highlighting a series of recommendations that he believes will go a long way to contributing to these efforts. These recommendations can be broken down into several key categories. First, Kerry highlights the need to broaden SDO leadership when creating new standards. To do so, Kerry emphasizes the need for SDOs to increase transparency, curate more involvement for major stakeholders, and improve participation in standards development. Second, Kerry discusses the need to increase government support roles. Here, Kerry highlights the need to increase funding for key government agencies, like the National Institute for Standards and Technologies (NIST), while also simultaneously elevating standards development functions. Lastly, Kerry highlights the importance of aligning standards development internationally. With this last recommendation, Kerry draws attention to several key strategies that include improving governmental transparency about their standards discussions, clearly articulating broad objectives for their standards strategies, improving collaboration on foundational research and development, and creating trade agreements that extend the Technical Barriers to Trade agreement.
Follow-Up Questions.
After last week’s podcast interview, CAVEAT reached out to Kerry’s team to gather some additional insights from a series of questions we still had that would add greater context to his publication. One of the major questions that we asked Kerry was:
“As tensions rise between the US and China, how can these nations overcome their current tensions and not politicize SDOs to create new standards to address emerging technologies effectively?”
Kerry responded with two key insights. First, the US needs to stand by its existing commitments to bottoms-up, technology-driven standards, while simultaneously responding to China appropriately and not overreacting. Kerry continued by stating that China can hold its own within international standards bodies as the nation has very capable scientists and engineers who would make useful contributions to SDO efforts.
Another follow-up to this previous question we asked Kerry was:
“In your publication, you mentioned that while China has attempted to 'game' the standards development system previously, they have been met with little success. What steps can be taken at an international level to prevent influential nation-states from acting in bad faith when creating new standards? Or is this a scenario where the market will resolve these issues?”
Kerry responded by stating how so far the standards marketplace has worked pretty well. Kerry does note that while Chinese participants in SDOs have previously proposed poor-quality standards, they have either not been adopted in SDOs, or, if they have, the standard has not been adopted in the marketplace. Kerry continued by stating that the US and other countries committed to the standardization system should not overreact to these actions and rather focus their efforts on bolstering international SDOs and their processes.
We then changed subjects to discuss bridging the gaps between these major governments that have historically approached standard development differently. We asked:
“How do you reconcile differences in creating global standards when each of the major global actors approaches standard development differently? Are the existing international summits enough currently to continue to bridge these gaps or are new solutions needed?”
When asked, Kerry responded by saying that each of these major governments all currently operates under the broad umbrella of a rules-based system that both discourages employing standards as barriers to trade while simultaneously encouraging international standards. Kerry continued by stating how existing international summits can continue to reinforce commitments. However, Kerry highlights how differences need to be resolved within SDOs by improving transparency and participation efforts to build better confidence in their procedures and the standards they develop.
Lastly, we asked Kerry:
“Historically, the EU and the US have approached matters related to privacy and cybersecurity differently, how can these influential actors manage these differing approaches to create effective global standards for emerging technologies still?”
Kerry highlighted how, unlike other previous technologies, these emerging technologies, like AI, are green fields without well-established practices and rules. Kerry believes that this dynamic will enable governments, like the US and EU, to have the opportunity to work together in tandem and avoid the fragmentation that has been seen previously.