--On Sunday, July 22, 2018 21:43 -0400 "John R. Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Laws often use standards published by private organizations. > For example, most state building codes in the US require that > construction comply with the National Electrical Code > published by the private National Fire Protection Association. > This has caused some interesting situations when you have to > buy a copy of the standard to find out what the law is. (Blog > post coming soon.) > > Our standards don't have that problem since we long ago > decided to give them away for free. Are there laws in the US > or elsewhere that use IETF standards? John, I think you are missing, or at least risking creating confusion about, part of the issue... (Apologies to those outside the USA -- while there are analogies to what I'm about to say in many (but not all) other countries, I'm going to use US practices in my explanation.) ANSI itself is private sector, as are almost all of the ABSI-accredited Standards Developers. That list includes NFPA (although it is one of the few "Audited Designators", a distinction best left for another discussion). For that matter, ISO is private sector as well. None of that has anything to do with whether standards are free or not. Some of those standards bodies have selling standards as a primary element of their business models and some make some or all of their documents available for free. ANSI does make a distinction between "health and safety" standards and the rest which the former much more likely to end up in regulations (think motorcycle and bicycle helmets, not just electrical codes), but I don't know whether that is relevant to the distinction you are trying to make or not. Nor do I think "we long ago decided to give them away for free" is quite right. RFCs were "unlimited distribution" and without charge since long before there was an IETF, much less when some RFCs started being identified as standards. I don't know if there was ever an explicit decision but I assume that, when the IETF decided to publish its documents (and standards) in the RFC series there had been any discussion about charging, that would have been the end of the "in the RFC series" idea. best, john
