Once upon a time, acquiring a standard involved writing to a far away address and then waiting "six to eight weeks" for a paper document to show up in your mailbox. By 1995 (when internet access became common) SMPTE was seventy years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.

Construction codes are still pay walled.

NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...

IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024

And there are many others.

(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)

Because it costs a massive amount to get standards with this technical quality. They go through meetings, have a decent amount of staff to run, organize, have conference costs (locations...), take years to get done.

Someone has to pay for this. Making companies (and often, many of the individual members do this out of their own pocket) pay it all means worse standards, as some people stop going.

Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.

Because these bodies want to maintain a moat for the products made by member companies. No more, no less.

A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards). So essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.

Back in the day when I was doing this kind of thing, we had to buy a whole load of British Standards. They are £100s each, and they each cover a small part of work. If you’re designing steel structures you need one for basic structural design, one for loads on structures, one for steel structural design, one for the steel sections themselves, one for foundation design, one for execution of steel structures, and many many more. It’s thousands of pounds.

Sometimes standards bodies are formed by an oligarchy of industry players who have decided that their businesses would be simplified by mutual interoperability. They have no interest in lowering any bar of entry for other players though; certainly, they don't care about some hobbyist who balks at forking up $300 for a document.

I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.