Whose food are you talking about? The people who write standards are usually paid by their employers (I've seen a few volunteers / enthusiasts too). They have

Whose food are you talking about? The people who write standards are usually paid by their employers (I've seen a few volunteers / enthusiasts too). They have food on the table, and the companies benefit from funding that work. After the work is done, distributing the result is virtually free. There's no need to extort hundreds of dollars for a 30-page PDF whose contents were written two decades ago by salaried employees. It's reality for IETF (and many other organizations) and I don't see why it couldn't work elsewhere. Somehow we need to find a way to upset the status quo, the same way Let's Encrypt has done for TLS certs and the way open journals are slowly gaining mindshare over extortionist publications. The challenge with standards is that they remain useful for a long time and you need interoperability (unlike with certs that you renew every year or three and which you can get from any number of CAs). Everyone wants to use the existing and established standards instead of reinventing the wheel, and we can't just copy the existing standards (though maybe we could "recreate" fully compatible standards because you can't copyright facts?). This is not a business problem, this is an entrenchment problem. And I guess there are some (big) companies that benefit from entrenchment and regulatory capture so it's in their interest to maintain the status quo. Naturally, everyone on ISO/IEC/IPC/etc payroll has an interest in maintaining the status quo.