[governance] Why standards from ISO are not freely available?

[John Levine]

Standards organizations such as ISO have been around a lot longer than
the Internet, and they've always depended on the sale of copies of
standards for support.  I'm surprised that the ISO says that sales are
only 30% of revenue, although that may be misleading since most of the
dues paying ISO members are themselves standards bodies such as ANSI
which in turn get most of their revenue from standards sales, too.
(In the US, it's faster and cheaper to get copies of ISO standards
from ANSI rather than ordering from Switzerland.)

Historically, the people interested in standards have been engineers
interested in building whatever the standards described, be it screw
threads or mobile phones.  I've paid for my share of printed ANSI
standards and PDFs and didn't begrudge the cost.

The proposal on the table appears to be that governments should pay
for standards production and distribution rather than standards users.
Why is that a particularly good use of public money?  Most Internet
standards are available for free from from the IETF anyway.  ISO
standards tend to be for complex things where the cost of copies of
standards is an insignificant part of the cost of developing whatever
a standard describes.

R's,
John
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