JoAnne Yates and Craig N.

Murphy

Introduction: Standards and the Global

Economy

Keywords: industrial standards, standardization, globaliza-

tion, the metric system, standards organizations, industrializa-
tion, stakeholder governance, consensus standard setting

S tandards for measurement, for compatibility, for performance, and for

other characteristics of products are ubiquitous. They have been central
to businesses in all the lead industries since the Industrial Revolution,
including today’s global manufacturing firms, which depend on intricate
supply chains based on standard shipping containers, and businesses that
are based on the Internet and the World Wide Web, which rely on thou-
sands of computer and telecommunication standards. Standards have
also helped transform, and often markedly improve, the lives of average cit-
izens in industrialized countries: water and sewer systems, electric lights
and phones, and every modern home entertainment system would have
been inconceivable without the modern standard-setting system.
Yet, standards and standard setting are not widely studied by histo-
rians of the global economy, including business historians. Only a few
business historians have focused on the complex, hybrid system of
public and private organizations that creates standards, either broadly
or in specific technical domains.1 The articles included in this special
issue demonstrate both the relevance of standard setting to business

1
We take a broad view of private industrial standard setting in JoAnne Yates and Craig
N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Baltimore, 2019). We
draw on the book heavily in this introduction, and unless otherwise stated, information
about standard setting not linked to one of the articles in this issue comes from it. Business
historians who focus on standard setting in particular technical domains include Steven
W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in
America, 1840–1920 (Cambridge, U.K., 2002); Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping
Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, 2006);
Andrew Russell, Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks
(New York, 2014); and Lee Vinsel, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations
in the United States (Baltimore, 2019).

Business History Review 96 (Spring 2022): 3–15. doi:10.1017/S0007680522000058

© 2022 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 0007-6805; 2044-768X (Web).

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 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy / 4

history and the field’s capacity to shed light on some major puzzles in the
history of modern standard setting, concerning how, when, and by what
type of organization (public, private, or hybrid) certain standards were
set. Addressing these puzzles contributes to understanding why the
hybrid global system developed the way it did.
Long before the Industrial Revolution, local rulers and governments
set localized standards for measuring weight, size, and other fundamen-
tal quantities, but a globalizing industrial economy needed much more.
By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, machine-based trans-
portation networks and mass production required standards for mea-
surement, performance, compatibility, and interoperability. To be
useful, most standards increasingly needed to be set not locally but for
much wider market areas—countries, empires, or the entire world. Gov-
ernments at all levels often lacked the competence and interest to create
the needed standards. Most of the technical standards that supported the
emergence of a global economy in the twentieth century were developed
as voluntary standards in private standard-setting bodies, in which gov-
ernments played a limited role, if any. The major exceptions are funda-
mental measurement standards and safety standards; in both cases, the
public interest was served by making such standards mandatory rather
than voluntary. Articles about these exceptions bookend this special
issue. Yet even in these areas, technical experts from industry also
played an important role, as the articles demonstrate (see timeline at
end of introduction).

Government Involvement with Fundamental Standards:

The Metric System

Modern measurement standards were essential precursors to the

industrial standards that make up the bulk of standards produced by
today’s global standard-setting system. In France, although leaders of
the French Revolution had demanded national weights and measures
to eliminate the seigneurage collected by the local nobility in the old
system, the metric system presented to the National Assembly in 1799
was not officially adopted and enforced nationwide until 1840. By 1851
the French government championed the metric system as a potential
global standard, displaying a meter rod, a kilogram weight, and a liter
container at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition in London.2 In 1855,

2
On the evolution and spread of the metric system, see Robert Tavernor, Smoot’s Ear: The
Measurement of Humanity (New Haven, 2007), esp. 133–35; Robert P. Crease, World in the
Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement (New York, 2011); and
Ken Alder, “A Revolution to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in France,”
in The Values of Precision, ed. M. Norton Wise (Princeton, 1995), 39–71.

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 Introduction / 5

businessmen and diplomats from Europe and the Americas, led by Baron
Jacques Rothschild, created the private Association for Obtaining a
Uniform Decimal System of Measures, Weights, and Coins, to promote
the system’s adoption. In the nineteenth century many governments of
continental Europe’s industrializing countries did so (e.g., the Netherlands,
Italy, and Germany), as did the governments of the largest economies in
Latin America (e.g., Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina). Many more govern-
ments would do so by the 1920s (e.g., Japan, Russia) or soon after
World War II (e.g., Indonesia, South Korea). In contrast, the United
Kingdom announced it would begin to convert to the metric system only
in 1965 (a process that is still incomplete), and although the U.S. Congress
passed the voluntary Metric Conversion Act in 1975, the Reagan adminis-
tration suspended its funding in 1982, ending the U.S. effort.
Why did some governments adopt the metric system early, while
other governments have never made it mandatory? Our first two articles
address this puzzle, examining attempts by citizens to persuade the gov-
ernments of two New World countries to go metric. Anne Hanley looks at
the ultimately successful (though not free of controversy) adoption of the
metric system in Brazil, while Stephen Mihm examines one of several
unsuccessful attempts to convince the U.S. government to adopt the
system. In these two cases, scientists and engineers played important
but very different roles.
When Brazil’s government adopted the metric system, the country
had been independent of Portugal for four decades but was still a non-
industrialized country with many local measurement systems, a large
Indigenous population, and an economy based on African slavery.
Why did it adopt the metric system so early (1862, with implementation
by 1872)? In “Men of Science and Standards: Introducing the Metric
System in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Hanley explains that the
nation’s scientists and engineers (many educated in Portugal) supported
this move, which they saw as essential to the economic advancement of
their young country. The system was implemented despite uprisings
among peasants in a backcountry region. Previous scholars, Hanley
notes, have argued that this elite support was an example of adopting
“misplaced ideas” from Europe, but she contends that the situation is
more complicated than that. Advocates were undoubtedly influenced
by a transnational community of scientists and engineers who thought
standards were important to trade and industrialization, but she demon-
strates that these Brazilian scientists and engineers were also well
embedded in Brazilian society and important to their government’s
developmental mission. These elites convinced the government to
adopt the metric system, laying the groundwork for international trade
and industrial activity.

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 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy / 6

The United States was well ahead of Brazil in industrialization, with

its cloth mills, railroads, and machine shops, but it rejected the metric
system, posing a different puzzle. Common wisdom among historians
and others is that nativists and the uneducated opposed it—a view that
Mihm, in “Inching toward Modernity: Industrial Standards and the Fate
of the Metric System in the United States,” shows to be mistaken. In
1880 and again at the turn of the century, members of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers and their business allies in the National
Association of Manufacturers fought off attempts in Congress to adopt the
metric system. Why did these well-educated engineers and manufacturers
oppose this seemingly progressive move? In the late nineteenth century,
American engineers, working within engineering societies, had already
begun standardizing some industrial items (e.g., screw threads and steel
rails for railroads) using the inch system. Mihm shows that they feared
the adoption of metric units might reverse that progress. Leading engi-
neers and manufacturers testified against the metric system in Congress
in 1906, defeating the push to adopt the metric system led by Samuel
Stratton, head of the new and weak National Bureau of Standards. Early
U.S. progress in private industrial standardization using the inch system
apparently impeded governmental standardization of different funda-
mental measurements, and, as a result, prevented alignment between
U.S. national measurement standards and the metric system that would
soon operate throughout most of the global economy.
The two cases together clarify a larger puzzle. Both cases recognize
the importance of fundamental standards to industrialization and indus-
trial standardization, but the countries involved were at different phases
of development: before industrialization had taken off in Brazil, and after
industrialization and standardization were well underway using the inch
system in the United States. American engineers and manufacturers
already had vested interests in machines, products, and standards
based on local traditional measurements, making a change in measure-
ment systems a threat (rather than a boon) to industrialization and
standardization.

Private Industrial Standardization and the EU’s New Approach

From the late nineteenth century through the establishment of the

International Organization of Standardization (ISO) in 1946, private
standard-setting organizations spread from nation to nation, and ulti-
mately across the world, providing an infrastructure for the global indus-
trial economy. Governments of European and other countries used
intergovernmental bodies to coordinate telegraph and telephone
systems, which were government owned in all the leading industrialized

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 Introduction / 7

countries except the United States, but they were reluctant to set stan-
dards for other industries, leaving unfilled gaps as the need for compat-
ible iron and steel parts, machinery, electrical equipment, and other
products of industry grew. Seeking a public service role to reinforce
their newly claimed identity as professionals, engineers and their socie-
ties stepped forward to fill those gaps. But setting standards often
required expertise from multiple engineering domains.3 In 1901, engi-
neers from five British technical societies came together to form the
first broad national standard-setting body. Industry associations,
firms, and government departments (as purchasers of products) joined
the founding societies as members. They established a lengthy consensus
process in which committees of engineers representing a balance of pro-
ducers, purchasers, and the public interest developed industrial stan-
dards that manufacturing and purchasing firms would voluntarily adopt.
The British national standards body provided the model that engi-
neers in most industrializing countries copied in the early twentieth
century. Although individual engineering and industry societies contin-
ued to develop some standards in many countries, they adopted similar
processes and often proposed their standards to the national standards
body where they went through the process to become national standards.
The engineers who established the national bodies across Europe, the
Americas, East Asia, and Oceania formed a surprisingly close-knit inter-
national community and movement dedicated to promoting industrial
standardization to improve the quality of life, promote prosperity, and
contribute to international peace. From the start, leaders of this move-
ment were internationalists who sought to create a global economy,
and only five years after the formation of Britain’s national standards
body, members of many national electrical engineering societies estab-
lished the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to set inter-
national standards in the newest engineering domain. Unlike the
intergovernmental associations for telegraph and telephone, this
private international body included national delegations chosen by elec-
trical engineering societies, not governments. Standardizers later
attempted to establish a broader international standards body, but
World War II put the goal of international standardization on hold.
In 1946 standardizers from the victorious nations gathered in
London to establish a private, broad-based international standards
body: ISO. They navigated the postwar political currents, bringing
former Axis countries into ISO long before they were admitted into the

3
For example, standards committees representing four different engineering societies
cooperated to set U.S. steel rail standards around 1900. See Usselman, Regulating Railroad
Innovation, 215–39; and Yates and Murphy, Engineering Rules, 3–34, 40–51.

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 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy / 8

intergovernmental United Nations and assuring that the Soviet Union

and its allies remained active members of the standards community.
From the late 1960s onward, ISO set standards that would integrate
the global economy. ISO’s technical committees on containers and
ports established, revised, and maintained the standards that have
(until the COVID-19 pandemic) so successfully supported the supply
chains linking the global manufacturing system.4 ISO and IEC also
developed computer and telecommunications standards essential to
the digital economy, although that standards story is more complex, as
the next section will demonstrate. During the same period, standardizers
active in national bodies and in ISO also established another private, vol-
untary standards body, the European Committee for Standardization
(CEN), to serve both the six countries of the European Economic Com-
munity (EEC) and seven non-member European countries, bringing us
to the third article in this issue.
Grace Ballor’s “CE Marking, Business, and European Market Inte-
gration” addresses the puzzle of why a private body, rather than an inter-
governmental body such as the EEC, initiated Europe-wide standard
setting and why a hybrid, public-private system eventually grew
around that private core. Ballor focuses on how the system of CE
marking—in conjunction with the European Union (EU, successor of
the EEC), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA, initially
formed by the seven non-EEC countries), and the European standards
bodies (CEN plus two bodies added later)—has shaped “the relationship
between business and governance in Europe,” integrating the European
economy. During the 1960s and 1970s, both CEN and the EEC/EU tried
unsuccessfully to overcome national boundaries to free trade. The Euro-
pean intergovernmental bodies lacked the technical expertise to set
workable standards through legislation, and CEN could not impose its
voluntary standards. Beginning in the 1980s, the European Commission
proposed that the expanded EU and CEN and the other private European
standards bodies work together to remove and prevent standards barri-
ers to inter-European trade. EFTA, whose members were active in CEN,
quickly joined the effort. In 1985 the EU announced its “New Approach
to Technical Harmonization and Standardization,” which allowed the EU
to legislate what it called essential requirements and CEN to set detailed
technical standards that provided one (but not necessarily the only) way
to fulfill these requirements, thus retaining the private standards’ volun-
tary status. The European Roundtable of Industrialists, which met regu-
larly with the Commission, supported this approach because it created
an integrated European market for its members’ goods through voluntary,

4
See Levin, Box, as well as Yates and Murphy, Engineering Rules, 168–80.

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 Introduction / 9

not mandatory, means. The new system encouraged certification of

products meeting the essential requirements. In 1992, in a last-minute
rush to complete the single market on schedule, the European Commis-
sion approved a “Global Approach to Conformity Assessment and Certi-
fication” that included processes for CE marking.
The EU was only able to create a single market by collaborating with
private standard-setting bodies in this hybrid system of governance. It
built on the existing private standardization system. Meanwhile, begin-
ning in the late 1980s, another change—of kind, as well as scope—in
private standard setting was taking place in the United States, with
major implications for the global economy.

Internetworking Ushers in New Types of Private Standard Setting

After World War II, and building on wartime innovations, the com-
puter industry developed rapidly. In the early 1960s, existing private
standards committees in engineering societies and national and interna-
tional standards bodies were addressing standards for computer hard-
ware in the United States and beyond. But in the 1980s, alternative
ways of setting private standards would emerge around internetworking
to challenge traditional private standards bodies.5 First to appear were
corporate consortia, groups of firms that came together to develop or
support a new standard, often for software. A consortium typically
started with a few firms, often representing only one set of stakeholders
(e.g., either user firms or producer firms). With limited and like-minded
members, these consortia established standards much more rapidly than
traditional balanced-stakeholder bodies and became so popular by the
late 1980s that ISO and IEC, afraid of becoming irrelevant in this
domain, developed fast-track processes to enable consortium standards
to go through a truncated process to become ISO or IEC standards.
Another challenge to traditional private standard setting emerged in
the late 1980s around internetworking standards. In the early 1970s, the
U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency had
launched ARPANET to connect computers at universities and defense
contractors where it funded basic research in computer science. In
1983—by which time ARPANET had expanded in size and scope
and adopted the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP) data communication system—the Defense Department spun
off a civilian internet, establishing a body of “elder statesmen” to set
5
These opening paragraphs draw on Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge,
MA, 1999); Russell, Open Standards; Andrew L. Russell, “‘Rough Consensus and Running
Code’ and the Internet-OSI Standards War,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28,
no. 3 (2006): 48–61; and Yates and Murphy, Engineering Rules, 242–60.

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 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy / 10

its strategy. Two years later that body created a group of young computer
scientists, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to manage its
operating standards, following the model for ARPANET’s operations.
Meanwhile, in 1977 ISO launched a standard-setting committee for
connecting networks developed by different firms and government agen-
cies, and the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies supported its
work. But after the ISO committee established a seven-layer reference
model in the early 1980s, the process bogged down in developing stan-
dards for each layer. Ultimately the simpler TCP/IP, already being
used successfully by the rapidly growing commercial Internet, became
the de facto standard for internetworking, and the IETF became the de
facto private standards body for the Internet, a position it still holds
today. Despite its U.S. origins, it soon became effectively global as the
Internet spread around the world. Although its standards were volun-
tary, free, and (by the late 1980s) nongovernmental, IETF’s process dif-
fered significantly from that of other private standards bodies; it had no
membership (anyone could attend any meeting), no formal voting, no
required balance of stakeholders, no system for representing different
parts of the world, and a famously raucous, argumentative style.
So how did corporate consortia and the IETF become so important,
challenging traditional modes of private standard setting? Andrew
L. Russell, James Pelkey, and Loring Robbins’s article, “The Business
of Internetworking: Standards, Start-ups, and Network Effects,”
addresses this puzzle by delving into the competitive strategies of
firms—both large firms and, especially, small, entrepreneurial start-
ups (which often became large firms)—in the internetworking story.
They draw on a unique set of sources—market data collected by, and
interviews conducted by, Pelkey in 1988–89, in his capacity as an inves-
tor—that provide invaluable insights into the motives and problems of
businesses involved in creating and marketing networking and internet-
working products like modems, switches, and routers. Firms working in
this space needed fundamentally new standards to enlarge their poten-
tial markets, and the authors reveal the strategic actions they took that
assured such standards would emerge. Three large companies—DEC,
Intel, and Xerox—combined forces in the DIX (vertical) corporate con-
sortium to develop and promote the Ethernet local area network so the
market for LANs could grow and prices fall. They made the Ethernet
specification openly available through publication in the 1980 “Blue
Book” and subsequently supported it in the traditional Institute of Elec-
trical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards committee working
on a LAN standard, where it was chosen as one of three acceptable stan-
dards. Its open and free availability attracted start-ups in this market,
over the other two options.

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 Introduction / 11

Similarly, in the late 1980s, with the ISO effort bogged down, start-
ups and other firms had to make choices, and TCP/IP became the de
facto standard when enough relevant players offered internetworking
technologies based on it. They did so because it was simple, cheap, and
already successfully running in many operations; in addition, Dan
Lynch, a computer scientist involved in developing TCP/IP in the
1970s, marketed the protocol as a standard in the late 1980s. When
TCP/IP became the de facto standard, IETF became the leading global
standardization body for the internet. The Russell, Pelkey, and
Robbins article, which takes the perspective of firms operating in this
new field, reveals that the surprising ascendance of TCP/IP was a conse-
quence (albeit unintended) of these firms’ strategic interactions, just as
were the standards created by consortia and subsequently ratified by tra-
ditional industrial standards bodies such as the IEEE, IEC, and ISO.
If the rise of information technology consortia and the IETF
reflects how business strategies of private firms influenced private
standards, the final article in this issue examines an industry where
governments have long been active regulators, revealing how
private-sector interests can shape even a government-initiated
system of standardization.

Food Safety and Transparency in the United States: Standards as

Regulation

In “Standards as Consumer Protection: The U.S. Food and Drug

Administration’s System of Food Standards, 1930s–1960s,” Xaq Froh-
lich examines the unusual case of the U.S. government’s regulation of
food safety and transparency through the FDA’s food standards of iden-
tity. A government enforcing health and safety standards is not inher-
ently unusual; U.S. experts, like those in other countries, often
believed that safety standards should be mandatory and enforced by
law. Nevertheless, they frequently saw private standard-setting bodies
as the best place for standards to be developed, before they were man-
dated by government. Frohlich’s article addresses the puzzle of why
the FDA chose instead to develop its own standards and how industry
ultimately pushed back, resulting in a return to a hybrid, public-
private model of standard setting.
As food became increasingly industrial in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, some parts of the food industry developed
private quality standards used among producers, wholesalers, and
retailers, but retailers did not typically communicate them to consum-
ers; instead, they developed branding to distinguish themselves in the
market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed

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 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy / 12

voluntary quality standards that producers could adopt to allow finan-

cial valuation of their agricultural products, protecting farmers and
ranchers but not consumers. In the early twentieth century, the FDA
worried about food adulteration, a threat to the health and safety of
consumers and a form of fraud. Consequently, it sought transparency,
or a return to “self-evident” food. No legislation, however, allowed the
FDA to prohibit adulteration before the fact; it could only pursue fraud
in the courts after a product was on the market. After multiple
attempts to pass such regulatory legislation were caught up in legisla-
tive battles, Congress finally passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act
of 1938, which allowed the FDA to promulgate standards of identity for
mass-produced foods. These standards specified the ingredients and
their proportions in industrial food items allowed to be called a partic-
ular name (e.g., ice cream, peanut butter), thus providing a floor, but
not a ceiling, for quality and safety. To establish these standards, the
FDA publicized a recommendation; held (often contentious) hearings to
get input from concerned parties, including food industries, consumer
groups, and health representatives; and then declared a legal standard.
Food items not meeting the standards were required to be labeled as
“imitation” (e.g., imitation ice cream) and to list all ingredients.
Although the system initially seemed to contain adulteration and
impose some order on the market, by the 1960s, Frohlich shows, it
began to break down as the food industry developed more specialized,
often dietary, additives (e.g., low-calorie artificial sweeteners, vita-
mins), which consumers and the food industry wanted but the FDA
opposed in most foods. By the late 1960s the food industry and Repub-
lican administrations were increasingly attacking and ridiculing FDA
standards of identity as constraints on consumer choice. In response,
the FDA ceased to set new identity standards in 1973 and adopted
the ingredient labeling that American consumers see today, allowing
the food industry to proliferate new products as they had wished.
Meanwhile, Frolich notes, “regulators from the FDA joined industry
and government representatives from around the world in developing
a global food safety regime of food standards known as the Codex Ali-
mentarius.” The battle around food safety moved to this international,
quasi-voluntary body, overseen by the Food and Agriculture Organiza-
tion and the World Health Organization, in which experts representing
private and public stakeholders sought consensus on standards.
National governments could then make the standards mandatory or
not, as they preferred.
This article emphasizes the power of industry relative to that of gov-
ernment in standard setting. The U.S. food industry wanted to expand
the range of products it could develop to tempt consumers, and it

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 Introduction / 13

persuaded the federal government to move away from the increasingly

questioned food identity standards that got in its way. But by noting
the shift to the Codex Alimentarius, Frohlich also acknowledges the
power of the hybrid, public-private model of regulatory standard setting.

Conclusion

The five articles in this issue illuminate the nature and development
of the complicated public-private system of standard setting on which
the world economy depends today, providing answers to some of the
puzzles it poses. The interests and strategic actions of firms and indus-
tries, the government’s capacity and interests, the push to create wider
global markets, and the expertise of scientists and engineers have com-
bined to establish and maintain or modify the complicated standards
system, without which the global economy could not function.

. . .

JOANNE YATES is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management,

Emerita, at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She and Craig N. Murphy
coauthored Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (2019).
She has written other books in business history and served as president of
the Business History Conference.

CRAIG N. MURPHY is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political

Science at Wellesley College. He and JoAnne Yates coauthored Engineering
Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (2019). He has written other
books on global governance and is a past president of the International
Studies Association.

Timeline for Standards and the Global

Economy

1840 French government mandates the metric system for all

uses across the nation
1855 Baron Jacques Rothschild and others establish the Asso-
ciation for Obtaining a Uniform Decimal System of Mea-
sures, Weights, and Coins to spread the metric system
internationally

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 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy / 14

1862 Brazilian government adopts the metric system for

implementation by 1872
1889-1902 Standards committees of US engineering societies estab-
lish steel rail standards
Early 1900s Engineers and industrialists prevent US government
adoption of the metric system
1901 British engineering societies form first private national
standard setting body
1906 Electrical engineers from many countries form first
still-surviving private international standards body, the
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
1906 US Congress passes the Pure Food and Drug Act
1916-1939 National private standards bodies formed in many
countries
1938 US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 orders the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to create stan-
dards of identity for industrial food products
1946 Standardizers from World War II allied and neutral
countries establish the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO)
1957 Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands form the European
Economic Community (EEC), predecessor of the Euro-
pean Community (EC, 1967) and the European Union
(EU, 1993)
1961 European standardizers form the European Committee
for Standardization (CEN), a regional private standards
organization for EEC and other European nations
1963 The UN Food and Agricultural Organization and World
Health Organization form the FAO/WHO Codex Alimen-
tarius Commission to set food safety standards
1973 FDA introduces guidelines for labeling ingredients and
nutritional information, stops issuing standards of identity
1979-80 DEC, Intel, and Xerox form consortium to develop and
promote Ethernet as a Local Area Network (LAN)
standard
1983 US Defense Department Advanced Research Projects
Agency adopts Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol (TCP/IP) for ARPANET and spins off civilian
internet
1985 EC adopts “New Approach to Technical Harmonization
and Standardization”

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 Introduction / 15

1986 The Internet Activities Board (computer researchers

overseeing the civilian internet) create the Internet Engi-
neering Task Force (IETF) to establish and maintain
internet standards
1992 EC announces its “Global Approach to Conformity
Assessment and Certification,” a collaboration with
CEN and other regional standards bodies, as part of its
effort to create a single European market

. . .

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