First I must say that in Europe there have been, for years now, public initiatives in favor of Open Standards & Open Source from the European Union. Basically what USA’s CTO said now, is that it is important to have Open Standards to allow Innovation, and that the Private sector is also important. What he failed to address is that Open Standards actually benefit the private sector, because they allow fair battles between competitors and make the road difficult for Big Companies (e.g. Microsoft) to crash small companies through monopoly practices. You can see the news in following link:
Obama’s CTO Aneesh Chopra: Innovation and open technology standards are key