Indigenous standard development in the presence of dominant international standards : the case of the AVS standard in China

Abstract

Standards are ubiquitous, affecting the lives and business of citizens, companies and governments in a multitude of ways. As governments around the world realised the economic consequences stemming from standardisation, newcomers to the international standardisation arena have found themselves at a disadvantage owing to a lack of expertise and skills to contribute to the process, and the ‘barring’ strategies practiced by the keepers of the system in part as a result of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) royalties they collect from globally imposed standards. In this paper, we use the case of China's Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS) to examine government positions and possible strategies for standard market competition in the presence of a dominant international standard. In our analysis, we adopt a system perspective on the Chinese government's market intervention policy.