That is, unless it's in a regulated industry that is required by law to follow the actual standard. Then it disobeys the law most of the time, and "disobey" the market the rest of the time and everything breaks. Also, it leaves the people with a secret law that nobody can know the consequences.

The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster.

ISO was founded in 1947, and back then very many of its standards were about physical objects – pipe threads, screws, bearings, belts, film, steel, plastic, rubber, textiles, etc – and even today they still have many standards on those kinds of topics. Imagine you are an aerospace engineer in the 1970s, and you need a copy of the new standard ISO 46:1973 (Aircraft — Fuel nozzle grounding plugs and sockets) – if nobody at your work has a copy, you just order it and pay for it with the company's money (expense it, get your boss to sign the purchase order, whatever). Nobody would have a problem with that and you wouldn't think there was anything inappropriate about it either, it would just seem totally normal to anybody in the 1970s.

The problem is that technology and culture have changed and ISO hasn't kept up – especially for software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught, in which multi-billion dollar companies will charge millions for software packages and then include in their code some open source library that someone maintains as an unpaid hobby, in which many employers baulk at paying for things which in prior decades employers would have just paid for without question. The culture has changed from one in which people are used to paying money for physical books in person or via mail order, to one in which they expect to get information from the Internet instantaneously and for free.

And it is probably mostly in software that people complain about this. I could be wrong, but I would guess that for aerospace engineers it is no more an issue today than in the 1970s. Even if ISO were to charge a few hundred dollars for a standards document, it would still be a lot cheaper than most things aerospace engineers deal with, and your employer will pay for it, who cares. At big firms such as Airbus or Boeing, they probably have some kind of subscription so their engineers just get access to all new ISO standards automatically.

It's just that both regulations were much lighter so much fewer people would be affected, and at that time the world was in an extremely totalitarian mood, divided by two countries that imposed dictatorships wherever they went. But entrepreneurship existed by then just like it does now, and you can bet many people went poorer because they couldn't access the standards.

Also, they were much less accessible. If you couldn't just go to a library to read them because they weren't free, it meant most people could not get them at all. It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center.

In the 1940s, if you wanted to read legislation, there was no downloading it for free off the Internet – either you purchased a printed copy, or found a library that held it – and you may have had to travel some distance to do so, there was no guarantee that your neighbourhood public library did. Most people viewed charging for printed copies of legislation as acceptable, given that it cost money to print them. So, in that sense, legally mandated ISO standards weren't fundamentally different from laws in general. Prior to the 1990s, when the Internet began to change people's expectations, the idea that everyone was entitled to a free personal copy of all legislation was not widely accepted, and few would have labelled that situation as anti-democratic or as "absurd secret law".

> It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center.

In the 1940s, rather than calling the ISO secretariat in Switzerland directly, you would have called your national standards body, who acted as a reseller. Buying standards then was only harder than today in the sense that buying anything back then was harder than today.

Was the idea that everyone is entitled to a copy of all legislation at cost widely accepted? Or did most people believe the the publisher (or the legislature?) should overcharge them and stand to make a profit off it?

I don't know how much "at cost" would be for ISO, but something tells me it wouldn't be an identical 158 CHF for both PDF and paper.

Of course, that doesn't entitle you to a copy, making it available at libraries is already enough.

In the real world, most people follow legislation without ever reading it. People build a rough mental model, based on media sources, government websites, common sense, etc, which divides acts into "probably illegal", "probably legal", and "grey area". If they stick to the "probably legal", they are unlikely to have any legal problems. If they are seriously considering venturing into the "probably illegal" or "grey area" zones, a wise person hires a lawyer and gets some professional legal advice first. The majority of the population has no hope of ever understanding legislation – something people on this website tend to forget, because most people on this website are significantly more intelligent and better educated than the average person is. And even those of us who aren't intimidated by legislation and case law and law textbooks, in the way that the average person is, ought to remember the old adage "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client"–if you don't have the formal training and real-world experience of an actual lawyer, it is easy to make a costly mistake–e.g reading some law literally, and unfortunately you never found the case law which interprets it to mean something quite different from what it literally says. Keep the amateur lawyering as a hobby, maybe some real world situations where the cost of being wrong is low (such as challenging a parking ticket), and rely on a professional for anything actually important.

> Of course, that doesn't entitle you to a copy, making it available at libraries is already enough.

Well, ISO standards are freely available at some libraries. Generally national libraries, major public research libraries, university libraries (some of which are open to general public, others restrict admission to staff/students/etc.) Your local public library probably doesn't have any copies of ISO standards–mine doesn't. But, my local public library doesn't seem to have copies of legislation and case law either – my local public library has very little in the way of serious/professional/academic legal texts, just some very introductory stuff aimed at the general reader.

As far as the official version of federal/national legislation goes – in 1947, in both the US and the UK, that was sold by a government agency overall at cost or even at a loss. ("Overall at cost" meaning, they might sometimes have made a profit on an individual print run, but profits they made on some print runs were balanced by losses on others, so they didn't make a profit overall.)

However, most lawyers preferred to use private editions published by for-profit publishers, which added copyrighted notes providing cross-references to other relevant legislation, important court decisions, etc. So the "raw" version of the legislation was available at-cost but the version most lawyers actually used was not. And that remains true today – most lawyers don't rely on the freely available versions on the web, they use expensive commercial subscription services (Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc) which add lots of very useful privately copyrighted notes–and you really need the information in those notes to properly interpret the law, because if you don't have cross-references to other legislation and case law, you won't know what it really means in practice–and although you could probably reconstruct those notes yourself to some extent (such as by searching free case law databases for references to a certain section of legislation), doing so is laborious and likely to be error-prone (it is easy to miss something important because you didn't use the exactly right search term, etc). So even now, access to the law is not as "free" as many think it is.

> I don't know how much "at cost" would be for ISO, but something tells me it wouldn't be an identical 158 CHF for both PDF and paper.

I think from ISO's viewpoint, it is "at cost", because they are not just including the cost of printing or hosting the download, but also the administrative and editorial costs of producing the underlying standard. ISO is a not-for-profit body and any profit it makes is reinvested into the standard development process. By contrast, when you buy a copy of an Act/Statute from the government print office, you are not paying for the actual running costs of the Congress/Parliament/etc which produced the legislation – that is paid for through taxation – whereas ISO being a private body can't levy taxes.

That's not to say that ISO has to use their current model. They could make all their standards freely available and try to recover the editorial/administrative costs through some other mechanism – charging membership fees to corporations, government grants, etc. However, while those methods are feasible – other standard bodies use them – I think ISO would respond that they would make ISO more dependent upon and more beholden to corporate and government interests than they currently are. I suppose the critical response to that is that ISO already is quite beholden to corporate and government interests, and it is hard to see how it could get any more beholden, but ISO would not agree with that.

Consider also the pace of innovation in software and networking—the internet at large. I think it's both a consequence and a cause of the change in culture you described.

Carl Malamud has been fighting this point worldwide with some success for decades. For example here's the state or Oregon agreeing: https://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/index.html

Industries that are more reliant on ISO or other non-free standards are surely worse off because of it.

Yes, and? The draft standard is the pretty much everyone actually uses. For most purposes it's the "real" one.