Just what we need, another standard!
A committee like that can't make a full work product in less than 2-3 years, so no need to worry about it any time soon.
And will absolutely require their spy-cloud to operate...
I have little faith in a group that can't even come up with a universal charging plug.
Sounds like another open spec that all three will put their proprietary layers on top of, making products only loosely compatible so that the best experience will still be to go all in on one brand. 
This was also posted earlier this morning:
And here
I hope the standard includes published local API definitions for all devices; including WiFi and Bluetooth. If they do this right, it will greatly simplify life for a year or two until someone thinks they are smarter.
The CHIPS initiative FAQ is a good read.
Time will tell I guess .,.
Would this be a ZigBee protocol that Hubitat would natively support or would this be a whole new protocol that would compete with z-wave and ZigBee and Hubitat wouldn't support?
Well they say IP based so not the Zigbee we have today. There was an announcement a while ago about dot dot (renamed Zigbee cluster library) and Thread being used together. Maybe something along those lines.
IP based and designed to collect lots of info on your patterns of device usage in the home. Apple says what happens on their platform stays on the platform but yet they partner with the largest data collection firms on the internet.
HE is becoming more and more unique as time goes on. Having a local smarthome is not a common thing, and while it certainly should be, it's interesting knowing we're not contributing to their metrics.
The point of this is to bring a unified IP-based networking protocol that can be implemented over a variety of networking technologies, including but not limited to WiFi up to Wi-Fi 6, Thread over 802.15.4-2006 at 2.4 GHz, and Bluetooth LE. As I understand it, Thread itself is already IPv6-based, using 6LoWPAN, requiring a (specialized) router to connect to the internet.
ZigBee is a 802.15.4 specification like Thread, but it focuses on personal area networks, and - as is the case with the Hubitat Hub - requires a coordinator (hub) but does not make any provisions to make ZigBee devices accessible on other IP-based networking technologies. This is changing with the ZigBee Alliance's 2017 announcement of renaming the ZigBee Cluster Library to DotDot which is planned to run on other IP-based networks and interoperate with Thread and other standards.
It seems a safe assumption that most existing ZigBee 2.4 GHz devices will always continue to require a coordinator (hub), but my guess is perhaps in future some hubs may be updated to allow for direct IP-based connections to those devices through some kind of translation layer.
A very important thing to note about this standard is that it will be royalty-free and open source.
A good overview and short Q&A can be found here:
