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FYI: ANSI Press Release
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Dear Standards Professional:

Recently, the attached press release was distributed to members of the U.S. press and to key staff members of the Congress and the executive branch. While the issue of easy access to standards documents is certainly an international issue that spans all of the standards bodies, this particular effort was meant to educate policy makers and members of the press about the crucial role that ANSI plays in the United States.

If you would like a hardcopy of the release and the petition, or an on-line version of the names that signed the petition, please feel free to contact me. If you have comments or questions, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Malamud

******************************************************************** ******************************************************************** For Immediate Release ******************************************************************** For more information: Carl@Malamud.COM (Internet) cmalamud (MCI) ******************************************************************** ********************************************************************

Over 500 Engineers Sign Petition to Pressure ANSI to Change Policies on Standards Distribution

o The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is under increasing pressure to make key technical documents more widely available and to charge less for those documents.

o Hundreds of engineers signed a petition expressing a crying need for immediate distribution of standards documents on computer networks.

o The petition states that technical standards are the key to today's open computer networks and wide accessibility of those specifications is vital for the education of U.S. engineers and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry.

o The ANSI petition is only the latest instance of mounting pressures on public standards bodies to change their policies to reflect what a U.S. Office of Technology Assessment study called "the public interest."

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private organization is the self-designated national coordinating body for U.S. standards development. In the field of computer networks, these technical standards are crucial, defining how we build the open systems that are the foundation for the emerging global Internet.

The U.S. has always been in the lead in the field of computer networks, and an important, vibrant industry has developed to supply local and international markets. Firms such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Synoptics, and many others derive billions of dollars in revenues and employ tens of thousands of professionals.

The key to the continued U.S. lead in this computer networks has been the vibrant, open nature of the U.S. Government- sponsored Internet. The Internet has grown from a Department of Defense project into a global mesh connecting 15 million people in 102 countries.

The global Internet is built on standards. Many of the key standards on the global Internet are widely available. Because the standards are publicly available, multiple implementations of technology are provided by vendors and by the research community. Problems in the standards are quickly discovered and fixed by the large community of people that are implementing modern computer networks.

Not all standards are publicly available, though. ANSI charges up to $10 per page for a large body of crucial documents. ANSI, as the U.S. representative body to the international standards-making community, has an exclusive license on the sale of many key international specifications. For example, the U.S. government has mandated a particular set of specifications for government procurement, known as the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standards. The key documents that define OSI are sold exclusively in the U.S. by ANSI and its licensees for prices of several hundred dollars per inch of paper.

High-priced standards means that college students and young professionals don't read the documents. These documents are a crucial part of their education as professionals and lack of accessibility leads to lack of knowledge. The results have been dramatic, with those standards that are publicly available quickly fueling U.S. economic growth and those that are not available foundering within the large institutional bureaucracy that ANSI has built up.

Placing these documents on computer networks means that the standards are distributed quickly and widely to U.S. industry. The Office of Technology Assessment, in a recent study, emphasized that "standards will need to be made available to producers in a timely and efficient manner. Failure to understand the implications of international standards can have serious consequences for U.S. industry."

A recent project under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union to distribute 19,000 pages of the key recommendations known as "the Blue Book" illustrates that on- line, free distribution of standards is a viable proposition. The ITU gave permission to a group of volunteers to post the Blue Book on the Internet. Within 90 days, over 500,000 files had been transferred to thousands of computers in 40 countries. There was clearly a demand for on-line standards, but unfortunately the ITU cancelled the experiment in 90 days. A letter from Pekka Tarjanne, the Secretary-General, stated "we know now what can be done" but a Communications Week article reported that "politics" may have been the guiding concern.

To demonstrate that there is a demand in the U.S. for ANSI to change its policies and permit on-line, free distribution of standards, a petition was circulated among the community. The petition reads:

We, the undersigned, believe that all technical standards documents should be freely available in electronic form. Open, on-line access to technical standards documents is an important factor in the success of my organization, is a key component to increased productivity in the U.S. computer and communications industries, and is vital for the initial and continued training of scientists, engineers, and other professionals.

Over 500 computer and communications professionals signed this petition. Signers include all members of the Internet Architecture Board, the key technical body guiding the evolution of the emerging global Internet. Other prominent members of the community such as Mitch Kapor of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Dr. David Clark of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science also lent their support.

Employees of almost every significant participant in today's computer and communications industries have signed this petition. Although the signature of an individual does not necessarily reflect a corporate policy, it is clear that there is widespread support for wider dissemination of technical standards coming from all parts of the profession: industry, research, and academic communities are all heavily represented.

For more information:

To purchase copies of the OTA study, ask the Government Printing Office for Global Standards: Building Blocks for the Future, S/N 052-003-02177-4. Voice calls to (202) 783-3238, fax to (202) 512-2250, and postal requests to New Orders, Superintendent of Documents, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954.

To learn more about the ITU Bruno Project, contact Tony Rutkowski, Director of Technology Assessment at Sprint International and the former Counsellor to the Secretary-General of the ITU. Voice calls to (703) 689-5080, e-mail to amr@nri.reston.va.us.

For more information on the subject of on-line standards, contact Carl Malamud, coordinator of the ANSI petition drive. Voice calls to (703) 548-1126, e-mail to carl@malamud.com.

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