Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

Link here has some info about it:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181019/12232640876/appea...

Because ISO likes free money. In most cases ISO doesn't pay the authors and reviewers of standards, so instead of posting the document for free, it gets to indefinitely receive 100% of the profit from the work. It's a sweet deal for ISO, and a terrible deal for the rest of the world. ISO's paywall makes it very difficult to apply their standards. It's essentially an anti-standardization stance, not what you'd expect from a standards body. It's especially a problem because today's complex systems depend on millions of agreements that need to be standardized (not necessarily by ISO).

More generally: If a publisher charges money for a document, you should ask if the authors (or their employers) are getting paid a royalty on the profit. If the authors (or their employers) are getting paid a (decent) royalty, then that's a decent justification for the charge. If the authors/employers are not getting paid, then that looks suspiciously like an exploitative relationship. ISO is in the latter camp. Que bene?

I'll use ISO standards, and if my employer pays me I'll participate in an ISO process. But I strongly prefer working with standards organizations who have changed their processes to fit the 21st century. Today many people's expectation is that a standards body will make the standards freely available, since there's no excuse to do otherwise. ISO fails that test, and instead has a big paywall. The historical justification was to support a printing press, but that is completely unnecessary today (just post the PDF or HTML, that's all we need!). ISO will occasionally release standards freely (e.g., the Ada language specification and the Common Criteria were ISO standards that ISO agreed would be freely available even on initial ratification). But you have to work for it. Other standards-setting bodies, like the IETF, are typically wiser choices for developing standards.

I hope that someday ISO will change their policies. But as long as they're getting lots of free money, based primarily on work by people they don't pay, it's not clear why they would change.

I don't like the high prices either and wish these were available for free. At least the demand to have them for free is not unreasonable given that a large part of the work that goes in the standards is ultimately financed by tax money.

But to answer your question: Because the primary customers are organizations who are willing to pay. Individuals that are not affiliated with one of the paying organizations are not considered, unfortunately.

From a practical point of view it is not hard to get access. My experience is: As long as I was a student or an employee of a university the library provided me access and I was allowed to copy the standards as long as I needed them for my studies. When I left university I could still get a library card for the library and I could read the standards as long as I wanted but I wasn't allowed to copy them. Also every bigger company I worked for provided access. At least that's my experience.

Unfortunately, that torrent doesn’t seem to include all the standards. For example, none of these seem to be included:

http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC35/WG1/

Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.