European standardisation organisation’s leadership election embarrasses EU Commission

ETSI, one of Europe’s standardisation organisations, has just elected the representative of an American company to chair its main decision-making body – despite the European Commission’s ‘digital sovereignty’ push.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute, ETSI in short, has been leading in shaping technical standards for key global technologies since it was first established in the late 1980s.

However, when Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, the main driver of a ‘digital sovereignty’ agenda in Brussels, presented a European standardisation strategy to make the EU’s voice better heard internationally last year, ETSI was named and shamed as problematic.

Citing the example of a standardisation request for the Galileo satellite system that ETSI turned down, Breton slammed the body as being under ‘undue influence’ of non-European companies and put forth a reform of its inner workings to give more weight to national representatives as opposed to business members.

Since then, the EU executive has started excluding ETSI from crucial standardisation requests, notably on the AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act, the two most important digital files at the moment.

As Euractiv previously reported, ETSI entering into a collision course with the Commission was driven by the fact that its director general, Luis Jorge Romero, strived to assert independence from the Commission, thanks to the body’s business model that is privately funded.

However, the relationship between ETSI and the EU executive is not bound for improvements after the general assembly elected its chairman, Intel’s Markus Mueck, on Wednesday (29 November).

Only organisations established in the countries participating in the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) can partake in ETSI’s decision-making, and Mueck himself is a German national.

Still, electing a representative from an American company, albeit through its European subsidiary, does not sit well with the Commission’s declared intent to counter ‘foreign influence’ in European standardisation bodies.

Mueck competed against two other candidates, Jochen Friedrich of IBM, another American corporation, and Enrico Scarrone of Telecom Italia. In other words, only one out of three of those running for office represented a European company.

The EU Commission attempted to gather support behind Scarrone. However, according to a person involved in the voting – speaking on the condition of anonymity given the topic’s sensitivity – this coordination effort came “too little, too late”.

Particularly embarrassing for the EU executive is that, although the vote is secret, based on the distributions of the votes, Euractiv understands that the French and German governments did not support Scarrone.

“This election might not necessarily make the relations between ETSI and the Commission worse because it shows that there might simply not be a mandate for the Commission to push for digital sovereignty,” the person familiar with the matter continued.

To make things worse for the Commission, the proposed reform of ETSI would not have altered the result. Currently, members have weighted votes, which can top 100 for the companies paying the largest fees and 40 for national governments.

The Commission’s reform, set to apply as of April, is meant to rebalance this distribution, giving more weight to national governments following the model of the other European standardisation organisations, CEN-CENELEC.

Nevertheless, since France and Germany seemingly did not support the only candidate from a European company, the outcome would likely not have changed.

“It’s clear what the problem is. There is not enough coordination among European actors in standardisation bodies,” the source added, stressing that the Commission showed a “lack of leadership”.

This lack of coordination is particularly staggering, considering that the Commission set up the High-Level Forum on European standardisation precisely to have a permanent platform with the stakeholders involved in standard-making.

The second meeting of this high-level forum took place on Thursday (30 November), with the in-person attendance of Breton, who avoided mentioning ETSI.

The European Commission did not react to Euractiv’s request for comment by the time of publication.

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

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