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

[Jeffrey A. Williams]

John and all,

  I also have paid my fair share of fees to the ISO and ANSI
for copies of standards documentation and also did not
begrudge the cost.  But this is hardly the point.  Many people
in many poorer nations cannot afford those costs, so they cannot
know what a particular ISO standard is, and as such could care
less.  This benifits no one in a positive manner, as such standards
loose meaning and certainly adhearance.  Ergo it is in the "Greater
Good" for ISO to cease charging for such standards documentation
accordingly, and provides for a far greater and broader opertunity
for access to knowledge, which is essential.

John Levine wrote:

> 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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Regards,

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