[michaelt]

I suspect (although I've made no effort to verify this) that some standards organisations were set up in the days of paper copies and secretaries and typists, when they needed a 10-storey office building [1]. So naturally they set up a pricing structure reflecting those expenses.

Then they kept the employee numbers and pricing structure due to institutional inertia.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/MK3C9AUgzV16Svem8

[tracker1]

There's more to an organizations overhead than just the web servers. There's staff, reviewers, publishers, editors, etc. Of course, it's probably still most likely over-priced, and I have no insight into ISO's operational funding or internals.

[SahAssar]

Do ISO handle proofreading, editing and so on? My impression was that they mostly did publishing, which has become less and less of a cost center.

[dwheeler]

I think that's exactly correct. It's more than inertia; they are being paid to not update their polices, so they're incentivized to not do so... even though their policies inhibit the use of standards (their purported goal).