3 ms·

I suspect most of the operations costs come from doing things in their obsolete way. If you eliminated the paywall, there'd be no reason to run a paywall, whic

I suspect most of the operations costs come from doing things in their obsolete way. If you eliminated the paywall, there'd be no reason to run a paywall, which imposes substantial costs. A lot of their costs are for printing paper, but one of the main draws for paper is that they lock down the PDFs with onerous licensing restrictions so the paper is often far more efficient from a legal perspective. If they just posted everything as a PDF on a website, they could hide behind a CDN and much of their operations costs would disappear. I couldn't find specific numbers for how much that would save. But I suspect the majority of their costs - probably 90% or more - would be eliminated if they eliminated the paywall.

robocat 6y ago
Come on, we are talking about $20 million! I don’t think half their staff are dedicated to billing and website design related to the sale of ISO standards. Also sister comment mentions that member organisations make a profit from them too, so the revenue lost is greater and member organisations would lose revenue, not just the ISO.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  I didn't say that. I said: > A lot of their costs are for printing paper, but one of the main draws for paper is that they lock down the PDFs with onerous licensing restrictions so the paper is often far more efficient from a legal perspective. The reason to publish paper is primarily because of the paywall. Oasis does not bother, nor does the ietf. If ISO eliminated billing and stopped publishing paper then I would be unsurprised if most of their costs disappeared.