If a company wishes to sell a CE-marked product in the Single market, it must demonstrate compliance with the applicable European Union (EU) harmonisation legislation — and for most product categories, that means working with harmonised technical standards. As the legislator does not wish to specify all the technical details itself, it also refers to harmonised technical standards, which companies previously had to purchase.

Until recently, this document cost the company money – perhaps 80 Euro, perhaps 180 Euro, depending on the standard and source. Thanks to a landmark court ruling and the willingness of a small country to implement it, the situation is now changing. The set of rules that companies previously had to pay to access could soon be available free of charge throughout Europe.

That sounds like good news for quality managers and compliance teams. It is considerably less straightforward news for the organisations that write the standards in the first place. If those organisations lose the revenue that keeps them running, the standards themselves may start to suffer.

The Court Case that Upended the Business Model

On 5 March 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment in Case C-588/21 P, the so-called Malamud case, brought by two non-profit organisations. Their argument was essentially one of the rule-of-law principle: citizens cannot be expected to comply with the law if they cannot read it, and harmonised European standards cited in EU legislation are, functionally, part of the law.

The Court agreed up to a point. It found that there is an overriding public interest in the disclosure of harmonised standards under Regulation 1049/2001 on access to documents and annulled the Commission’s prior refusal to release four toy safety standards. Crucially, the Court stopped short of ruling that harmonised standards lose their copyright protection altogether, a finding that the European Committee for Standardization (French: Comité Européen de Normalisation, CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (French: Comité Européen de Normalisation Électrotechnique, CENELEC), the two main European standards bodies, received with something close to relief. But the practical implication was stark: when someone asks the Commission for access to a harmonised standard, the Commission would have to make this available free of charge upon request.

Although this decision was legally beyond dispute, it fundamentally called into question the business model of independent standards bodies, which rely on the sale of standards as a key source of income.

In January 2025, Slovenian Institute for Standardization (SIST), took the logical next step. Backed by state funding from the Ministry of Economy, Tourism and Sport, it began offering all European harmonised standards (hEN), as well as any standard exclusively incorporated into Slovenian legislation, free of charge to anyone who requests them. No invoice. No payment. Just access.

What the Revenue Model Actually Looks Like — and Why It’s Vulnerable

To grasp why these matters, it helps to understand how European standardisation is funded. CEN and CENELEC are not EU institutions. They are private, non-profit associations whose members, the national standards bodies (NSBs) such as Germany’s DIN (Deutsches Institute für Normung), France’s AFNOR (Association française de normalisation), the UK’s BSI (British Standards Institution), and 31 others, organise technical committees, recruit expert volunteers, manage national consultations and translations, and maintain the entire administrative apparatus of the standardisation process.

Much of this is funded by the sale of standards documents. A typical EN standard sells for 50 to 200 Euros per copy; multiply that across tens of thousands of documents, tens of thousands of business users, and 34 member countries, and you have a substantial revenue base built up over decades. For some smaller NSBs, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, sales of standards represent a very large share of operating income. A Slovenia-style model without replacement funding could be an existential threat.

The tension is structural, and it has been papered over for years. In the case of the European harmonised standards (hEN), Standards bodies are being asked to produce a public good using a revenue model that depends on restricting access to that good. The court ruling has simply made that contradiction impossible to ignore.

The Complication: ISO, IEC, and the International Dimension

The situation is more complex than the “free harmonised standards” headline suggests. Many EN standards are not purely European in origin; they are co-authored with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) under the Vienna and Frankfurt Agreements, and those Geneva-based bodies retain copyright over the underlying texts. When the Commission began extending the free-access logic to these internationally co-authored standards, ISO and IEC pushed back, filing Case T-631/24 before the General Court in December 2024. That case is still pending.

The practical effect is already visible. Since the dispute began, only “pure-EU” standards – those with no international counterpart – have been added to the Official Journal’s harmonised references list. For sectors like medical devices, where most standards are co-authored with ISO, this is creating a regulatory gap that manufacturers are only beginning to grapple with.

Slovenia Points the Way — But Doesn’t Solve the Problem

SIST’s move is not simply an act of Slovenian generosity. It is a model that the European Commission appears to be encouraging. In 2024, the Commission funded a call through the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) inviting CEN and CENELEC to develop a “readability platform”: a centralised, free-to-read portal where users could access standards online without downloading or reproducing them. Currently, the readability platform is in active development — the developer procurement was underway in mid-2025 — but has not yet launched publicly.

This is the compromise the standards community has been pushing towards: free to read, but not free to copy or distribute. CEN and CENELEC acknowledge that “free readability access to harmonized European standards is an important issue,” while insisting the transition must preserve “the integrity and sustainability” of the system. Whether that middle ground holds remains to be seen. What is certain is that the old model of selling PDFs at 100 Euros a piece is not coming back. The urgency of finding new business models is no longer a future problem. It is a present one.

Seven Ways Standards Bodies Can Rebuild Their Revenue

The good news is that national standards bodies are not without options, and some of the most commercially successful among them have already been pivoting for years. The revenue question is genuinely difficult, but a range of workable alternatives and supplements to document sales exists. Here is what the transition can look like in practice.

1. Training, Education and Qualifications

Understanding a standard is not the same as being able to implement it, and businesses pay considerably more for expert guidance than for the document itself. The BSI Group in the UK – the most commercially diversified of the major NSBs – already generates most of its revenue from training and certification rather than standards sales, with courses on ISO 9001, ISO 27001, AI governance, and dozens of other areas operating in 195 countries.

The market is real and growing as regulation proliferates.

2. Certification and Conformity Assessment Services

Auditing and certifying companies’ compliance with standards is a high-margin, recurring revenue business. BSI issues over 84,000 certificates per year; AFNOR runs a dedicated certification arm. For NSBs without this capability, partnerships with accredited certification bodies can generate licensing income without requiring the NSB to become a conformity assessment body itself. It would be conceivable to shift the timing of financial compensation from the purchase of the standard to its current use. However, this would only work for a third-party assessment performed by an independent, accredited body is involved; and would not work if self-assessment by the provider (manufacturer/supplier) of the product or service were permitted.

It is also helpful to look at the business models of private standards schemes such as GlobalG.A.P. This business-to-business standard for the fresh food supply chain makes all its standards documents freely available on its website. Revenue is generated not through document sales but through fees paid by accredited certification bodies, certified producer organisations, and producer group administrators. In effect, those who wish to claim certified conformity to the standard pay for the right to do so.

3. Subscriber Models and Value-Added Digital Services

Standards Australia offers a useful model: tiered subscription packages ranging from small-business and mobile-only access to customised multi-user licences, alongside separate licensing arrangements that allow companies to incorporate standard content directly into their own contracts and business documents.

If the standard text becomes a commodity, the opportunity lies in everything around it: searchable cross-reference platforms, amendment trackers, automated revision alerts, and jurisdiction comparison tools. The model mirrors what LexisNexis and Westlaw built around court judgments: public domain content wrapped in high-value intelligence products that professionals pay for.

4. Consultancy and Technical Advisory Services

NSBs hold unique expertise in the standards they helped develop, including those used in the context of technical regulation. Several NSBs, including BSI and Denmark’s DS (Danish Standards Foundation), have built consultancy arms serving companies navigating compliance, quality managers designing management systems, law firms advising on product liability, and governments developing technical regulations.

5. Increased Public Funding

The Slovenian model deserves reframing: SIST is not giving standards away. The state is paying for them. Public funding from member state governments or EU institutions via the Single Market Programme could cover a greater share of production costs in exchange for open access.

It is how the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) operates in the United States: federal standards are produced with public money and published at no charge. A risk with this approach remains: over time, states can demand more influence over the content of a standard, undermining market needs. 

6. Industry Participation Fees

Standards are shaped by industry experts in technical committees, and those companies have a strong interest in influencing the outcome. Tiered membership packages, offering priority access to draft documents, committee influence, and early intelligence on upcoming revisions, align financial sustainability with the core value proposition of the standardisation process.

7. Quality Mark Licensing

NSBs such as BSI operate proprietary quality marks (the Kitemark being the best known) that layer voluntary credibility on top of mandatory CE compliance. Licensing these marks and charging for associated audit and renewal programmes generates meaningful recurring income independent of document sales.

However, the options described are more applicable to national standardisation organizations than to European and international ones. This raises questions about the division of responsibilities and financial relationships between ISO, IEC, CEN/CENELEC and their member organisations.

The Bigger Picture: Who Bears the Cost of Regulatory Infrastructure?

The controversy is, at root, a question about who should bear the cost of producing the technical rules on which the single market depends. The current model places that cost mainly on end-users through document purchase. Critics argue this is perverse, analogous to charging taxpayers to read legislation. The alternative, public funding with open access, has merit but raises real concerns: would standards bodies remain as responsive to industrial needs if their revenue came from government grants rather than market demand?

There are no easy answers. What is clear is that the Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling has disrupted the old equilibrium, and the standards community now faces a genuine structural challenge, one that requires creative thinking about business models, not just defensive lawyering about copyright.

What to Watch

Three things will determine how this plays out:

• Whether the EISMEA-funded readability platform is built and adopted as the primary free-access route across Europe.
• The outcome of Case T-631/24, which will decide whether the free-access principle extends to the internationally co-authored standards that dominate most regulatory sectors.
• The upcoming revision of Regulation 1025/2012, the EU’s framework standardisation law, could finally settle the funding question at a legislative level.

Regardless of the specific rulings handed down by the courts, it is already clear today that standards organisations are being called upon to fundamentally rethink their business models. Those organisations that invest now in training, certification and products for digital intelligence will emerge stronger. Those that spend the next few years defending a revenue model that the courts have already begun to dismantle will not succeed.

The standards themselves may well become free of charge. The expertise required to apply them will never be.

References:

Court of Justice of the European Union (2024). Action brought on 6 December 2024 – International Electrotechnical Commission and ISO v Commission, Case T-631/24, 2025 (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

European Commission (2025). Free Access to European Harmonised Standards in Slovenia, News article 08/01/2025 (Retrieved 23(03/2026).

European Commission (2025). Have your say – Public Consultations and Feedback, Standardisation Regulation – revision, website, (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

European Partilament (2024) Review of the standardisation regulation. In “A new plan for Europe’s sustainable prosperity and competitiveness”, website, (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

GLOABALG.A.P. (2024) General Regulations. Rules for Individual Producers. English Version, published 02/09/2024, (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

Kanevskaia, O. (2024). Is it really all about the money? The future of European standardization after PublicResourceOrg,  European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 16 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue on Charting the Landscape of Automation of Regulatory Decision-Making , March 2025 , pp. 344 – 351 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2024.64, (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

NIST, Standards Organizations that Offer Free Access to Their Standards, website (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

Soroiu, A. (2024). The Fall of The Great Paywall for EU Harmonised Standards, Verfassungsblog on matters constitutional, 19/03/2024, (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

Standards Australia. Convenient solutions to buy and access standards, website, (Retrieved 23/03/2026)

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Brian Paul Stalton, Pamela Tarif and Christian Schoen for their comments on the draft version of this blog post.