ETSI

When ETSI was founded, it was decided that the delegation principle wouldn’t be introduced, unlike when the organizations CEN and CENELEC were founded. That means that all types of organizations can become direct members of ETSI, while you have to be a national standardization organization to be a member of CEN and CENELEC.

One of the main reasons for doing so was that they wanted to take the unique needs of the information and telecommunications sector into account since ITU, on an international level, was a UN body rather than a member organization like ISO and IEC.

In practice, this means that there are some significant differences between how ETSI develops standards compared to CEN and CENELEC. The biggest and perhaps most notable difference is that ETSI’s standards are free to download and available to anyone directly on ETSI’s website. Standards developed by CEN and CENELEC, on the other hand, you need to buy to access.

The reason why ETSI has chosen to make its standards available to users for free is that this allows them to reach a greater audience and shorten the update times since the users don’t have to purchase new editions every time the standard is updated.

Another thing that differentiates the organizations from each other is that you don’t necessarily have to be a member of a national standards organization to be a member of ETSI. In contrast, to be involved in the standard development in CEN or CENELEC, you need to be a member of either SEK or SIS. However, something the three organizations do have in common is the principle applied when voting on European standards. These can only be voted on by the national standardization organizations, since they are the ones who establish the European standards as national standards.