Yes, the short-term financial implications (cost of standards) are minor compared to cost of employees and consultants (source: I am a consultant). However, non-free standards have a gazillion second-order effects which tend to get overlooked:
- Potential founders (think YC) can't "just quickly browse a standard" to see whether they'd want to build a startup in that area.
- Individuals not affiliated to a company won't purchase them for themselves (too expensive) and therefore are excluded from contributing.
- People can't write blog posts which freely cite passages from a standard --> Less public information on how to actually implement a standard in a company.
- People can't make presentations (slides) with passages from a standard --> A lot of paraphrasing and beating around the bush, making presentations more useless.
Imagine, for a second, the following thought experiment: Open source software on GitHub would be behind a similar paywall, say, 50 EUR per software package. You could make your argument again: Compared to engineering salaries, that's a minor amount. Sure. But the second-order effects are gigantic, essentially killing the open source ecosystem because individuals (like a random person from a third-world country) are entirely cut off and barred from contributing.
Or, like: Would DHH have written rails if access to Ruby would have cost 50 EUR?