Interoperability Overseas

The Internet has convinced policy makers around the world of the importance of interoperability. In particular, Australian and Asian policy makers have concluded that their domestic firms can participate in the global market for information technology only if those firms’ products can interoperate with the products developed by the dominant U.S. firms. As policy makers in the Asia-Pacific region have studied the issue, they have learned that the domestic firms can achieve interoperability only if they can reverse engineer the dominant firms’ products. Because of the nature of computer programs, most forms of software reverse engineering require the making of