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Standards always imply wide public access, an openness of the standard in both setting of the standard as well as access to the standard. It is therefore important to realise that an Open Standard would necessarily have to meet higher standards of openness than those provided by article 41 of document SCP/13/2. It is furthermore important to add that “de facto standards” are typically not standards, but vendor-specific proprietary formats that were, as the secretariat correctly pointed out in the introduction to this discussion, “strong enough to impose themselves on the market.” It is for this imposition on the market that “de facto standards” are commonly used to describe monopolistic situations and corresponding absence of competition, which conflict with the basic purpose and function of standards.

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