Opinion
Normally, the membership assemblies of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) are uneventful. But the one starting tomorrow threatens to be a turning point.
In one respect, the situation has been defused: Samsung withdrew its complaint over ZTE’s licensing practices (October 16, 2025 ip fray article). There was a serious risk of this week’s ETSI General Assembly (GA) having to vote on that matter.
But ACT | The App Association’s membership application is still on the agenda. For a reminder, ACT lied about its membership status (June 20, 2025 ip fray article). There are respectable and self-respecting organizations that would close the door to an orgnaization after such misconduct, at least for many years. Not so in this case.
The ones who raised concerns include a French ministry and various national standard-setting bodies (June 24, 2025 ip fray article). They deserve everyone’s support for having the courage to stand up to a deceptive Big Tech lobbying scheme.
I’ve come across ACT on several occasions. So let me tell you about what ACT is all about. And then let’s talk about what ETSI really wants (and hopefully does not want) to be.
The first thing to understand is that ACT has never held a membership vote in its entire existence. Let’s get real: does anyone out there seriously believe that companies are “members” of an organization if they have no say?
ACT’s president and chairman are corporate officers. ACT is, by its own admission, a non-profit corporation (well, it’s not a charity, but salaries and perks are the only way that its management can extract value from it). It is not a club. At ETSI, you can vote. You choose your leadership. You vote on issues. At ACT, “members” are not really members. They fill out a form, pay nothing for it (at least not in recent history; early on there may have been a nominal fee, which they waived), and have zero power.
The one who pays the piper picks the tune. ACT is entirely funded by large technology companies. At the moment, Apple is the most influential one of those backers.
When ACT came to a Brussels press conference of mine in early 2005, the organization had already existed for more than half a decade. Its founder orchestrated support for Microsoft, when it had serious antitrust worries on both sides of the Atlantic, and Microsoft paid for it. Microsoft left ACT a few years ago, and the Microsoft that bankrolled ACT in its early years was not the Satya Nadella Microsoft we know today.
ACT’s Brussels office was simply a Sidley Austin lawyer’s office. Sidley, at the time, was Microsoft’s go-to firm for antitrust, patent litigation, and other legal work.
Back then, about 20 years ago, they claimed they had thousands of members, just like they claim now.
Back then they gave the very same answer when someone said “but you’re funded by Microsoft, not by those small companies you claim to represent”: they said that Microsoft (and a little later, with a view to patent policy, also Oracle and others) simply supported ACT because they wanted to enable small companies to afford to advocate their interests.
Be smart. There obviously are interests that large and small companies share, especially within certain ecosystems. But there are also many conflicts, particularly when platform owners tax and tyrannize small app developers. When Epic Games’s U.S. antitrust case against Apple went to trial in the Northern District of California in the spring of 2021, there was not a single app developer who testified in Apple’s favor. It was only shortly before the end of the trial that one company, Snap, issued a public statement supporting Apple, and a little later its stock price went down because of the impact of Apple’s “App Tracking Transparency” policies. No large company would fund an organization controlled by members who have divergent interests.
This is astroturfing: pretending to be something else than they are. They are a lobbying service provider to Big Tech. They claim to represent small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If one looks at the “members” (again, they are powerless and therefore not genuine members), one can see that ACT does not really represent thousands of companies that actually make products (November 2, 2025 ip fray article).
ETSI wants to be and must be inclusive, but if it allows itself to be hijacked, then innovators will have to look for a different platform. If all else fails, in another jurisdiction.
ACT is not going to contribute anything of value to ETSI. It’s another question whether Apple should have more voting power at ETSI. It could probably make a reasonable argument for it, given its role as both an innovator and an implementer. But an astroturfing vehicle is not the appropriate strategy.
If anyone can join ETSI, no matter how dubious and regardless of whether they will contribute to ETSI standards, then the name of the game will be mobilization and orchestration. There will be more and more ACT-like members. All of that would just be a massive distraction. Ultimately, if innovators leave, it could be the beginning of the end of ETSI. No one wants that, but ACT and its backers are willing to take that risk.