In the telecom world, that would be a pretty terrible business model, as the list of entities who would need a copy of the standard is relatively short.
> 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.
That's what patents are for. The handful of standards that actually cost money to produce (i.e. MPEG, 3GPP, LTE etc) have patent holders that are specifically required to provide "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" licensing terms. If paywalling the spec paid for those standards we wouldn't have had a decade of HTML5 video not specifying a baseline codec.
