What is the tole of standards in future communications? In this talk, we present a vision of standards to help ensure both reliability and room for innovation. We argue that standards can successfully concentrate on purely functional matters, relying on modular APIs, rather than being prescriptive about methods, which often embed highly inefficient legacy technologies at a time when such waste is no longer tenable. We provide concrete illustrations of the possibilities of this construct, based on reliable transport with network coding and on universal decoding chips.