Comment

ABSTRACT

[...]in his year-end assessment of Brexit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson proudly highlighted a standards reversal as one of Brexit's signal achievements. Because the British government had rolled back its prohibition against using feet, inches, pints, and quarts, its centuries-old predecessor to the metric system, it was once again possible to produce Winston Churchill's beloved pint-sized bottle of whisky. The UKCA, some warned, might even provoke the kind of resistance that stalled the adoption of the metric system in Britain until its entry into the EU and led to a hybrid system of measurement in the United States. In other countries, especially the United States, where private industry seeking to make its investments more productive generated its own industrial standards using its traditional measurement system as a way of harnessing the forces of industrialization already underway, but also in the United Kingdom, and even in France where it originated, the metric system either was resisted or was rejected repeatedly. The acceptance of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as a de facto standard for internetworking showed that the formal standards process could be an impediment to the next wave of industrialization, while circumventing the process offered advantages for governments and private investors alike.