i'm a noob about these things. could you explain what you mean?

ISO (and FDA, etc.) standards tend to not be freely available online. Instead, you pay a few hundred bucks for a copy of the standard, which may be printed, electronic, or both. A sort of cottage industry even sprung up around this -- since the standard itself is copyrighted material, I think other companies are licensing it to resell.

Before the internet, and when the only users of standards were companies too large to care about a few hundred dollars, this made some sense. It's fairly annoying now, but existing businesses depend on this policy, thus they lobby, yadda yadda...

thanks. i remember trying to get a hold of the PCI standard a few years ago. there went my little hardware interface project ;_;