The Biden administration’s National Security Strategy released this month places emphasis on partnerships between industry and governments to shape technological standards that ensure quality, consumer safety, and global interoperability.
The strategy highlights global priorities and plans to enhance technology to support national security, the economy, and democracy. In the technology section, the report notes that the administration will work with allies and partners to harness and scale new technologies and promote the foundational technologies of the 21st century, with an emphasis on microelectronics, advanced computing and quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and biomanufacturing, advanced telecommunications, and clean energy technologies.
The administration recognizes standards’ role in supporting these evolving technologies, with the report noting on page 32: “We are already rallying like-minded actors to advance an international technology ecosystem that protects the integrity of international standards development and promotes the free flow of data and ideas with trust, while protecting our security, privacy, and human rights, and enhancing our competitiveness.”
To strengthen national security, the administration also acknowledges that the foundation of the modern economy must be “open, trusted, interoperable, reliable, and secure,” which necessitates working with partners to drive network infrastructure resilience in 5G and other advanced communication technologies, including promoting vendor diversity and securing supply chains, the strategy asserts. To that end, the strategy emphasizes that the administration will partner with industry and governments in shaping technological standards that ensure quality, consumer safety, and global interoperability, and to advance the open and transparent standards process that has enabled innovation, growth, and interconnectivity for decades.
A companion document on the federal strategy for critical and emerging technology standards is expected to follow later this fall.
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Watch Under Secretary of Commerce and NIST Director Dr. Laurie Locascio’s keynote speech at the Evolving Standard Landscape Summit, hosted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Joint Member Forum during World Standards Week 2022.