"A major blocker to free and open source multimedia is isostandards"

This is absolutely true and the primary motivation for the AV1 codec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Purpose

Open and royalty-free standards mean anyone can create an implementation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Software_implementations

Hopefully this leads to broad adoption and more open, royalty-free standards.

I once heard colleagues talking about ISO 26262 and went to look it up. Apparently I need to pay CHF 42 to figure out what's in this "industry standard".

Sometimes I don't know which is worse, Elsevier or ISO.

ISO 26262 was pretty hard to understand last I had a glance. I'm happy to no longer be directly affected by it in my work.

ISO standards have always reeked of EU regulatory capture to me.

How? ISO membership isn't limited to EU countries.