> it is ridiculous and stifling progress that governments legally prescribe standards that are not open to everyone to implement

Standards-essential patents are required to be licensed this way. It's called "RAND licensing": reasonable and non-discriminatory. Everyone who participates in, say, ISO or the ITU, is required to fill out a form documenting if they own part of the standard and what terms they agree to license it on. If they refuse RAND licensing, their inventions get ripped out of the standard[0].

What you want is royalty-free RAND licensing. There are a few standards bodies that insist on royalty-free licensing, notably the W3C[1] and Khronos Group[2], but it's uncommon. Most standards bodies are in fields of endeavor that don't actually require free redistribution - in fact, they don't want it. They pay the people doing research for the standards on a "for exposure" basis[3]: they get their patented inventions in the standard, and as payment for their work, they get to charge a $2/unit royalty on every user, which they can then pour into research that yields more patents.

I'm going to be honest, royalty-bearing RAND (as in, pay up or don't implement) is probably the right fit for a lot of industries. We hate it because it steps on our (FOSS) toes, and if we can develop the software as a community, why can't we invent the underlying technology too? This is the idea behind royalty-free video codecs like AV1 - it turns out a community of amateurs can do video codec research after all[4]. But at the same time, cellular radio technology is quite possibly the worst thing to leave to amateur[5] software development. There's a lot of very expensive lab tests you need to do to make sure the technology works, to ensure hundreds of devices can communicate with the towers without jamming each other, and to ensure each one of those devices isn't pumping the user with shittons of radiation. There's a lot of boring research and regulation needed to make radio work at all, it's not something that can be hacked together in a weekend and collaborated on over time.

The real problem with RAND is that a lot of the licensing bodies that require it don't actually enforce that requirement all that well. For example, 4G and 5G cellular technology has a RAND requirement. If you want to put a 5G modem in a cellphone, there's a defined fee structure you pay that's the same deal everyone else gets. BUT, if you want to put a 5G modem in a laptop, that's not covered by the RAND promise, so Qualcomm reserves the right to charge whatever price it wants to each individual licensee, or even just not license it. This is why laptops with cellular modems in them are rare[6] and hideously expensive.

[0] For the record, most standards bodies do NOT have a means to do this to people who refuse royalty-free licensing, which is why ISO has failed to create a royalty-free video standard. Every time they try someone says "I own this, here's your royalty bearing RAND license", and the standard is dead in the water. In fact, not only did they fail to make the standard, they kicked Leonardo Chiariglione, co-founder of MPEG, out of MPEG for making too much of a fuss about it.

[1] Specifically as a reaction to the University of Minnesota trying to charge licensing fees for Gopher

[2] Which has resulted in a number of "ubiquitous" OpenGL extensions that aren't in the standard solely because they cost money to license, but can be accessed through de-facto standard extension names

[3] https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu...

[4] To be more accurate, AOM AV1 was only partially done by the community. Xiph.org contributed their work on Daala, but Google also included what would have become VP10. So there's still a lot of Google monopoly money in there. Furthermore, there's at least two companies claiming patent ownership on AV1 anyway, but I've yet to hear of any enforcement actions.

[5] Amateur as in ham radio, not amateur as in unskilled layman

[6] Apple doesn't sell a laptop with a cellular modem in it, and why the only Surface tablet Microsoft sells is the Qualcomm ARM version, not the x86 version. Qualcomm wants cellular capability to be a selling point of their ARM processors, so they (refuse to) license appropriately.