It could be useful for compiler editors, but if they are in the committee why would they buy the document they contributed to write? 
I would be curious to find some numbers about ISO standard sales.
We get a PDF for free but must buy the printed one if we want. However, ISO at this time forbids us from using paragraph and line numbers, and we use these extensively when citing the standard. (There is an effort to get ISO to relax the paragraph number rule, but for now they are disallowed.) ISO does not publish sales numbers.
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At 208 CHF / 221 EUR / 243 USD, very few individual Fortran programmers will buy the standard. If ISO charged say $50 for the standard (as a PDF) for individuals, it might generate more revenue. When scientific journals mailed paper copies, they charged libraries much higher prices than individuals.
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https://www.iso.org/structure.html
How is ISO financed?
Our national members pay subscriptions that meet the operational costs of the Central Secretariat. The subscription paid by each member is in proportion to the country’s gross national income and trade figures. Another source of revenue is the sale of standards.
However, the operations of ISO’s Central Secretariat represent only about one fifth of the cost of the system’s operation. Other costs are related to specific standards development projects and technical work. These costs are borne by member bodies and business organizations that allow their experts to participate and pay their travel expenses.
See also: https://www.iec.ch/system/files/2022-01/content/media/files/iec_iso_business_model_brochure_0.pdf
And the ISO FAQ says:
ISO’s national members pay subscriptions that meet the operational cost of ISO’s Central Secretariat. The dues paid by each member are calculated as a proportion of their country’s Gross National Product and trade figures. Another source of revenue is the sale of standards, which contributes more than a third of the budget.
In their 2022 annual report we can find financial information at the end of the page:
(today 1 CHF ~ 1.17$)
If we consider a standard is typically 200$, they sell something like 68000 documents per year. As there are ~25000 ISO standards, the mean number of sales is ~2.7 per standard and per year.
but only if the ISO Central gets the full amount. I guess the national committees (members) are getting their part, so all together they must sell more.
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The J3 Interpretation Document is 24-007.
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I have just discovered that some ISO standards are freely available:
I don’t know the reason why. They just say:
In accordance with ISO/IEC JTC 1 and the ISO and IEC Councils, these International Standards are publicly available for Standardization purposes.
For example, ISO/IEC First edition 1996-12-15, “Information technology - Syntactic metalanguage - Extended BNF”
Extended BNF, the metalanguage defined in this International Standard, is based on a suggestion by Niklaus Wirth (Wirth, 1977) that is based on Backus-Naur Form and that contains the most common extensions
Yes - the working group must request this and there is a vote across ISO. However, they are very selective as to which types of standards can apply and programming languages such as Fortran are not among them. Remember that ISO is partially funded by selling copies of standards.
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I wonder how many enterprises and government agencies today, in a relative sense, still place significant value to Fortran being an ISO standard.
There are quite obviously many programming languages that don’t have ISO (or some other agencies’) standards that are being used for mission-critical software.
Do the benefits of ISO as a publisher outweigh the costs of the bureaucracy it requires?
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No, but we’d have to convince various country organizations (INCITS in the US) to change. We could, theoretically, publish under IEEE. The reality is, though, that if we split from ISO, Fortran would no longer be recognized as an international standard. If you really want to kill off Fortran, that would be a good way to go about it.
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Wouldn’t be more remunerative to ISO if the Fortran Standard were cheaper?
As it is now, I think only an handful of copies are sold, mainly to the main compiler writers.
If it cost just ten or twenty (dollars or euro) I think many more people would buy it.
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Conceptually, the suggest is similar to the one of the Laffer curve in socio/macro economics (what distribution of tax rates offers a state most revenue):
That curve is related to taxation.
It is difficult to say which is the correct price of the “Fortran standard” in order to maximise the revenue of ISO.
I think that it will never be remunerative to sell the “Fortran standard”.
That is closely related to a monopoly market.
Without experimenting lowering the price, ISO will never know. On the other hand I don’t think it will be interested.
As an estimate one can compare the number of the ISO standard sold and at what price to the number of Fortran book (like “Modern Fortran explained”) and it’s price (assuming this numbers can be disclosed).
At least one has got a couple of points, and then judge.
Personally I may spend some tens of (dollars or euro) but definitely not hundreds. I may use the free interpretation document.