Comment by olieidel

The whole monetization and organization around ISO standards feels super shady.

One lesser known hack is to search the friendly Estonian site [1] for a cheaper version of the standard - they often create their own versions of the standards which much pretty contain the exact same content as the original. Unfortunately, in this case, it seems they only are offering the actual standard at a similar price [2]. Sad dog face.

It could be worthwhile to monitor the website to see if they release their own version for a better price in the future. Usually, their prices are ~10% of the original price (one more data point that Estonia does cool stuff).

We deal with the rather shady standardization organizations quite a lot as we work in medical device compliance [3]. I've heard all the usual arguments: "But standardization costs money!", "These organizations are doing good work!", etc., etc. No. I completely disagree. If something's a standard, that in my opinion makes it similar to a law - people should be able to follow it, and that requires people to freely access it. The EU Advocate General seems to agree [4]. And there are lots of standardizations which don't rely on shadily offering PDFs for money: ECMAScript and ANSI C come to mind, but the list goes on.

[1] https://evs.ee [2] https://www.evs.ee/en/search?OnlySuggestedProducts=false&que... [3] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/ [4] https://openregulatory.com/maybe-eu-standards-are-becoming-f...