Make the technical standards that laws require people to follow free for anyone to read
In short
- Anyone can read the full text of a technical rule that the law requires people to follow, for free.
- The law stops newly citing standards that can only be read by paying.
- The cost of making standards is paid by public money and certification fees, not by the people who read them.
- Small factories and students can check the rules they must follow without buying them.
If this comes true
In a seaside town, a young person at a workshop that builds solar lamps reads the full text of the safety rules of the country they export to, for free, and passes the first inspection on the first try.
Perhaps
The budget of a group that has held its meetings with money from selling standards might shrink, and the revision of the safety rules for children's toys might be delayed by a year.
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The proposal in detail
This covers technical standards that laws or government regulations cite in order to make them mandatory or to make them a condition for permission to sell or do business. Rules for electrical wiring, building structure, food hygiene, children's toys, medical devices, and cars are examples. When a law cites such a standard, it requires that the full text of the cited version be readable by anyone without registration or fees, and that it can be printed and quoted. A standard that does not meet this condition cannot be newly cited, and standards already cited are, after a transition period, either made free to read or replaced by the government with a different rule. The groups that make standards are paid compensation based on the actual cost of writing and revising them, and the money comes from public budgets and a small addition to the fees for the tests and certification that check whether products meet the standards. The groups keep the copyright to the standards, and rewriting the content and selling it without permission is banned, but reading, studying, and discussing the content are not blocked. When an international standard is cited, countries share the cost and make a single agreement with the international group to make it free. When some details must be kept hidden for safety reasons, the reason is stated, and the details are given free to the businesses that are required to follow the rule.
BenefitsEveryone can know the rules before they have to follow them
A law is fair only when the people who must follow it can know what it says. This proposal brings that obvious principle back to technical rules too. Small factories and makers in developing countries can check for themselves what to fix to pass an inspection, without paying to buy the rules, and they can enter the market on the same footing as big companies. Schools and job training can use the latest rules that are actually in use as teaching material, which lowers the cost of training engineers. When an accident happens, victims, reporters, and researchers can look into which rules the product met and whether the rules themselves had a gap, so mistakes in a standard are easier to find. The more people read a standard, the more opinions are likely to come in on drafts of its revision. In addition, when the income of the groups that make standards is cut off from how well their documents sell, they depend less on big companies through membership fees and sales, which can also prompt people to ask again who standards are made for. Removing the barrier to knowing the rules directly increases the number of people who can follow them and the number who can check them.
DrawbacksThe money and speed of standard-making depend on public convenience
The cost of making standards does not disappear. Only the people who pay change. If it comes from public budgets, taxpayers end up paying even for standards in fields they never read, and if it is added to certification fees, makers' costs rise and show up in the prices of products. When public finances get tight, the compensation for standards is likely to be cut first, revisions may be delayed, and the rules may fall behind new dangers. When the money comes from the government, the groups that make standards become more open to political pressure, and there is a risk that the convenience of the government of the day, rather than the judgment of experts, gets into the content. If an international group refuses to agree to make its standards free, a country has no choice but to stop citing international standards and write its own rules, and rules that differ from country to country can raise the burden on makers and create barriers to trade. Rules that a government office writes itself can also be of lower quality than the standards of a specialist group. Some small expert groups that have lived on sales of their standards will be unhappy with the amount of compensation and will cut back their work.
Learn the background
Many of the detailed technical rules that protect everyday safety are not written in the text of the law. The law only says that something must conform to a certain standard, and the content is left to documents written by groups of experts. But most of those documents are sold one copy at a time for a fee, and the only way to check what they say is to buy them. People can be punished or barred from selling their goods if they do not follow the rules, yet it costs money just to find out what the rules are. For a big company, this is a small expense. For a small factory in town, a maker in a developing country, a student, or a victim or reporter looking into the cause of an accident, it is a heavy barrier. It still has not changed, because the groups that make standards pay for expert meetings and their offices with money from selling the documents. They oppose making the documents free, saying they could no longer keep making standards, and government offices do not want to cover the cost instead. The cost of buying a standard works as a barrier for newcomers, which is not necessarily bad for the big companies already in the market, so strong voices calling for change are slow to rise.
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It helps pay for the server and the AI's planting
This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-23a) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes