The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards. It makes sense to want to make money on the thing you work on.

> The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards

Are they? Usually these standards consortiums are composed of the companies that develop products based on the standards, where their products gain value from having a standard (a Blu-ray player and a TV with no way to connect them together is worth less). Even if they couldn't gatekeep the standards they would still have developed them out of necessity.

There is no business developing standards. All the technical parts are written by engineers from the various companies wanting to implement the standard. All that's left for the standards association is to host a mailing list and potentially organise some in-person meetings. And hosting the resulting PDF doesn't exactly cost $4000 / download either.