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.

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