These standards aren’t just “plug C is 0.25 inches wide.” They are intimately tied to the compression technology itself. Developing new standards involves developing new compression technology, building and testing reference implementations, iterating, etc. All that costs money to develop. That will get paid for one way or the other. What way that happens affects the public interest analysis.

Look what happened with web standards. Developing and testing new web standards requires building reference implementations in browsers. Browsers are expensive to develop, so the standards are controlled by a handful of companies like Google and Apple. But the standards are free to implement. Is that better for the public? Maybe, but the public interest analysis is more complex than “free to implement.”

There is no such thing as “free.” R&D will be monetized somehow—the question is how. Different monetization approaches have different and non-obvious impacts on the public interest. Consider for example the shift away from paying for software to giving it away “free.” You used to pay Symbian $5-10 bucks per phone for an OS. Android you can get for free. But Symbian didn’t build an advertising platform into the core of each phone. Monetization matters.