Paper by Begoña Gonzalez Otero and Stefaan Verhulst: “Open geospatial standards are publicly available, interoperable specifications that let geospatial data, services, and systems be shared, combined, and reused across platforms and organizations. That is the conventional definition, and it is where the difficulty begins: it describes a property of documents, not of the institutions that produce them or of the infrastructures in which they are implemented. Open standards are candidate digital public goods; once embedded in public systems they become components of digital public infrastructure. The first is a property of the artifact and its license, the second a role the artifact comes into play, and the two can come apart.
This paper asks two questions. Under what conditions do open geospatial standards function as digital public goods, and as digital public infrastructure, rather than as channels of enclosure? And which institutions are positioned to secure those conditions? We advance one claim in answer to each, and they are claims about different kinds of things. The first concerns institutional governance design, over which standards bodies have real control: the internal governance architecture of standards-setting organizations materially conditions whether their outputs hold their public-good character and continue to serve as infrastructure. The second concerns a development none of them chose. The geospatial field is being rapidly platformized, as proprietary location stacks, API governance models, and cloud-native Earth observation platforms shift effective standard-setting toward platform roadmaps, pricing structures, and service terms; sovereign-cloud and sovereign-AI initiatives relocate that authority rather than reversing it.
The two are joined by a feedback loop. Weak internal governance accelerates the migration of coordination authority to the implementation layer, and that migration erodes the incentive to invest in open standardization, creating the conditions under which platformization can capture the coordination functions standards bodies are meant to perform. The consequences reach beyond the geospatial domain, weakening practical portability and the conditions under which FAIR data can be combined and reused across systems. We do not argue that voluntary standards bodies are best placed to resist this; their leverage over the implementation layer is declining. The claim is narrower: they retain standing over the specification layer while remaining largely exempt from the participation and transparency obligations that bind formally recognized standardization bodies, and where law does not supply the constraint, internal governance must. We operationalize this through four recurring dimensions of governance, Purpose, Principles, People and Processes, and Policies and Practices (the 4Ps framework), offered as a means of sustaining the input, throughput, and output legitimacy on which the authority of these organizations depends, and we state its limit: these are instruments internal to a standards body, directed at a problem that is not…(More)”.
