[ademarre]

Paying for standards is acceptable in a context where you are given a requirement to conform to some industry standard. But that is rarely how it works in software and networking. Instead of being told what specific standards are needed, often it is a process of exploration and discovery to learn what standards may be relevant to certain aspects of a system you are developing.

For example, I might read parts of a dozen different cross-referenced IETF RFCs just to decide what flavor of URL syntax I should accept in my API. At other times I might not even know whether a relevant standard already exists, so I skim a bunch of standards just to confirm it is necessary to invent a new thing. This would be very expensive in ISO Land, and the reality would be that the standards are never used.

Non-free standards for software and networking impede innovation. I can't imagine what the internet would look like today if the IETF and W3C charged for access to standards.