The European Commission has proposed a radical shake up of its policy on ICT standardisation, saying that a new approach is vital to boost the competitiveness of the European technology industry.

In a white paper (PDF) launched yesterday the Commission warned that, without decisive action in this area, it would fail to realise a number of policy goals requiring standardisation, such as e-business, e-government and security.

The white paper suggests the creation of a "permanent stakeholder's platform " to advise the Commission on ICT standardisation policy, and the updating of public procurement rules for IT to include services and applications as well as products.

The Commission also said that it would aim to define the attributes "which make ICT standards eligible for association with EU legislation and policies".

"We want ICT products and services to continue to be the drivers of the enormous growth of innovation we have seen during the past 15 years," said Günter Verheugen, a Commission vice president with responsibility for enterprise and industry.

"We want to set the right conditions to boost the competitiveness of the European ICT industry, and give fresh impetus to get out of the current economic crisis. A new modern ICT standardisation policy will also allow us to successfully respond to changing societal, market and policy needs."

Jonathan Zuck, president of international IT advocacy group the Association for Competitive Technology, welcomed the paper as a positive step towards a more flexible and forward-looking IT standardisation process.

"However, we remain concerned that the policy framework suggested in the white paper seems to favour open-source software over proprietary software to achieve more interoperability," he said.

"Open-source software is not a silver bullet to solve interoperability problems. Our key policy objective should be the removal of systemic bias, not its introduction."