Standards body
termnetworkinggovernance & risk
The laboratories, foundations and specification bodies the commercial entries are built on top of - not companies selling anything, or not only that.
A standard is an agreement about what two implementations owe each other, and the interesting question is always who is in the room. Bodies funded by the vendors they regulate produce different specifications from bodies funded by governments or by nobody, and the OSI period is the clearest demonstration: enormous institutional weight, conformance testing, procurement mandates - and a competing stack that shipped. Conformance to a specification and interoperation with another vendor's product are different properties, and the gap between them is where standards bodies earn or lose their authority.
Also known as: standards organisation, specification body, consortium