I've often thought that if standards organizations were truly interested in encouraging the use of their standards, they would make them freely available and recover their operation costs some other way. Even worse than the standards orgs themselves is IHS which acts as an electronic library (gatekeeper troll) for these orgs. In theory they are providing a service of managing electronic copies of expensive standards so that a big company doesn't get into licensing/copyright violations, but really all they're doing is adding overhead on top of stuff which should be free in the first place.

At one point the orgs were covering printing and shipping costs, but with electronic downloads and PDFs, it's really crazy to charge $$$ for a standard, especially when it doesn't include updates.

A couple exception to this madness: US government stuff (e.g. Mil-Std) which by law is all copyright free and downloadable, and USB.org is surprisingly and pleasantly just available for download.