Microsoft still pushing a standards tax

While putting it in the way of the weasel, Microsoft is still pushing what amounts to a tax on users of Internet standards.

(Image from Amazon.com.)

It’s doing this through a definition of “open standards” that would mandate standards bodies to consider patented, protected, proprietary technology on a par with truly open source offerings, and encourage companies to pack standards bodies with paid employees.

The way Jason Matusow, Microsoft director of corporate standards, does this would do credit to any Senator seeking to filibuster a wildly-popular measure.

He calls it “balance.”

I fundamentally still believe that innovations are opportunities…and that is a good thing (for the inventor and for society). But the “no IP restrictions” concept of “open standards” does away with too much. Out of balance.

In this Matusow is pretending not to know what having a standard means. It means everyone must use whatever it is you offer. Standards are, almost by definition, not innovative. They are what everyone has, what everyone is required to have.

If a standard includes “IP restrictions” of any sort, especially royalties (no matter how reasonable or necessary you consider them) you’re imposing a tax on all users for your invention.

My idea of balance is a bit different. Innovations are a good thing. But by the time an innovation reaches a standards body it’s no longer an innovation.

Standards are a base line. They’re the minimum entry point for performing a basic function. Any royalty or limitation on using a basic function represents a private tax against all users by one vendor.

If we learned anything at all from the OOXML debate it should be that any Microsoft victory there was pyrrhic. ODF was able to deliver on its standard long before Microsoft could change its own proprietary scheme to match what the ISO approved.

If their idea was to bury ODF in the corporate user base, Microsoft failed, and at enormous cost, both to its own reputation and that of the ISO standards bodies.

I think other companies saw this and will push back hard against any future Microsoft attempts to place its own proprietary technology ahead of open source, or at least royalty-free, offerings in the future. I think the standards bodies themselves have learned to read Microsoft pronouncements carefully, and assume weasel language, something that will cost Microsoft dearly for a long time to come.

But I wonder whether Microsoft has learned anything. (Tip of the hat to Raiden’s Realm for pointing out the need for a wag of the finger.)