This is substantially less true in practice than you'd think. I'm in automotive, so let's take ISO-26262, one of the main standards used to design your vehicle.

This is substantially less true in practice than you'd think. I'm in automotive, so let's take ISO-26262, one of the main standards used to design your vehicle. The contents of that are encoded in the NHTSA validation tests, basic compliance procedures, and all the certification paperwork, but the standard itself is "voluntary" and hence non-free. It's a massive standard with a dozen different parts that have to be purchased separately for a couple hundred each. Since group licensing also tends to charge by # of people with access, beancounters naturally silo access to this critical safety standard, with many of the thousands of engineers who work on any particular vehicle designing to a standard they've never read for themselves. Standards should simply be freely available. It takes time and effort to write them, but the consequences of limited access are borne by society.