SEP/FRAND as instruments of technological sovereignty: Rethinking global IP governance in an era of geoeconomic fragmentation.

Abstract

The SEP/FRAND regime has become one of the most sophisticated structures of private coordination within the digital economy, designed to reconcile patent protection with the technological standardization necessary for market interoperability. The geoeconomic transformations of recent decades, however, have placed increasing pressure on this institutional architecture, shifting the debate beyond traditional concerns related to economic efficiency, competition, and the licensing of essential technologies. In strategic sectors such as telecommunications, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and semiconductors, the ownership of standard-essential patents and the definition of access conditions to standardized technologies have come to influence broader dynamics of strategic autonomy, industrial competitiveness, and the distribution of power within the global economy. In this context, the SEP/FRAND system no longer operates exclusively as a mechanism of private innovation governance, but assumes a relevant role in structuring technological dependencies and shaping the critical infrastructures of the digital economy. Based on bibliographical, documentary, and jurisprudential research, this article argues that the politicization of technological governance requires a reinterpretation of the SEP/FRAND regime as an instrument of technological sovereignty, revealing a reconfiguration of global intellectual property governance in a context marked by geoeconomic fragmentation.