Specifically what I heard on the grapevine was that Microsoft sponsored a collection of small island nations into the ISO process, in exchange for their vote on OOXML.

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miohtama 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not only small islands nations. For example in Finland Microsoft partners invaded the local working group to get the standard passed in the voting process.

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Yizahi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That is not on MS though. That is a fault of those in change of ISO, that they assign same vote weight to the enormous empires and to the microstates. Votes should be proportional to the population, full stop. Then no one would be able to abuse the system by simply playing by the rules.

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MereInterest 3 days ago | parent [-]

So, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, failure to stop a bad actor from taking a hostile action absolves the bad actor of all responsibility for that hostile action? Because that seems to be what you're saying.

	▲	Yizahi 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Hostile to whom and on what basis? If two companies decide to merge, is it by default a hostile action? I don't think so. And what if later anti-monopoly agency decides that it was an infraction and blocks the merger? Then I think it was. Does informing voters about something is a hostile action by default? I don't think so. But if it was later decided that there was a law breach, then it would be hostile action. All people and even megacorps are innocent until proven guilty. Maybe even until accused of being guilty by some authority, though it is pushing it. But until someone at least does something to show their displeasure and point fingers, then yeah, no hostile action has happened, it was fair play. So to answer your question - vote bribing is 100% a failure of the organizer of said vote and of the law enforcement system (in bigger cases) IF that organizer or govt never complained about it or did jack shit in general. But if they at least complained or better did something about the problem, then yes, vote bribing failure would be a shared responsibility of both bad actor doing it and the people who hadn't done any reasonable prevention in advance. Since it is obvious that assigning equal weights to the countries can and did lead to the vote manipulation, I can say that ISO committee had NOT done reasonable prevention of vote manipulation and so is also guilty, just as bad actor MS.