Signal From Open Standards to Openly Governed: Standards-Setting Organizations as Stewards of Openness amid Platformization and Digital Sovereignty

Summary

Open geospatial standards let data, services, and systems work across platforms, but openness depends not only on the specifications themselves but also on the institutions that produce them and the infrastructures in which they operate, since standards may function as digital public goods and, once embedded in public systems, as digital public infrastructure -- roles that can diverge. This paper asks when open geospatial standards remain public infrastructure rather than becoming channels of enclosure, making two claims: first, standards-setting governance matters because institutional design shapes whether open specifications retain their public-good character; second, geospatial coordination is shifting toward proprietary location stacks, APIs, and cloud platforms where roadmaps, pricing, and service terms increasingly set the rules, and sovereign-cloud and sovereign-AI strategies relocate this power rather than remove it. The paper argues these dynamics reinforce each other -- weak governance pushes coordination toward the implementation layer, while platformization reduces incentives to invest in open standardization, weakening portability and FAIR reuse -- and that standards bodies cannot reverse platformization but still control the specification layer. It frames this through four dimensions -- Purpose, Principles, People and Processes, and Policies and Practices (the 4Ps framework) -- while stressing that internal governance alone cannot solve an external structural problem.