This might just be me being a joyless communist, but I think that all technical standards should be freely accessible.
Or even as a "middle" ground, all withdrawn, superseded, and "no-longer-relevant" ones should be released into the public domain.
I would not even consider this a wild idea or communist adjacent.
Let's take ISO as an example. They have a few places where they talk about this, but from their own brief (https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100007.pdf):
selling our standards allows us to finance their development in a neutral environment, to maintain them and to make new ones.
ISO very proudly wants to be a "neutral" platform. And here I think is where the problem lies.
For their definition of neutral, I think they are! They're not tied to any specific country, any specific company, any specific industry. At the same time, though, their standards are effectively developed by the external experts that make up the technical committees.
So it's not like they are truly independent either.
The focus on corporations is a relic of time, as far as i can tell. The prices of the standards being not a problem for even small sized companies.
But this hasn't adopted well to modern times and especially to areas like open source software, where individuals are reasonably interested in the specs as well. You can see a similar shift from organizations to individuals with academic publishing as well, with many taking issue with gate-keepy practices of publishers like elsevier.
What's even more frustrating, is that we now have deeply ingrained gate keeper organizations like ISO, elsevier, and many others. Now I could imagine a very relevant ISO that doesn't suck for individuals. But it often unfortunately seems like these organizations try keep being relevant so hard that from an outside perspective they seemingly are willing to even go against their mission statements. It can look that way, because you clearly aren't their target demographic. Let's look at this quote from the "ISO 2023 Strategy" (https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100364.pdf):
Change presents both risks and opportunities. Understanding how it occurs by monitoring these four drivers will enable us to anticipate and respond to their potential transformative impact on the ISO system in order to ensure our relevance in a shifting global context.
(emphasis mine)
I don't think ISO is evil or anything like that. But once an organization is big and a lot of people are ingrained with it, it necessarily will try to survive. And that's not a bad thing. Adopting to the needs of the people that live right now, and to bridge the gap between what you did in the past and what you do in the future is something any organizations has to do constantly. The real criticism i have with it, is that the way these organizations go about it tends to misunderstand or ignore the crowd that isn't actively engaged with them, and rather pander to their existing audience.
Your real source of growth hasn't yet gotten involved with you and there is a reason for it.
So when I read in their strategy thingy
To realize our vision, our standards must be widely used. We need to ensure that our standards are high quality, easily accessible and usable, and that people understand the benefits that they bring.
(again, emphasis mine)
I wanna cheer and be like "yes you get it!" and when they continue with:
To encourage the widespread use of ISO standards and attract experts to the development process, we must clearly demonstrate the benefits of using ISO standards.
I wanna scream "NOOOO". It's not about "showing off the value" of what you do. Your standards are already everywhere. What keeps a lot of people off, is the barrier to entry. You clearly misunderstand the people that you want to newly attract. The problem people have isn't that your stuff isn't valuable, it's that you have to pay to look at it. People rather engage with standards from literally some corporate consortium, because their stuff is royalty free!
The only saving grace is, that ISO in particular seems somewhat open to change and when it turns out that their strategy in this department doesn't work, i do have hopes for them to get it right eventually.
In the meantime though, this is highly frustrating and literally a hindrance.