Documents Anyone Can Read, Rules Anyone Can Ignore

The specifications are public and free, and following them is a choice each operator makes for its own reasons.

The written outputs of this process are published openly and cost nothing to read. Anybody curious about how a given convention works can go and look, and anybody wanting to build something compatible can do so without permission or licence fee. This differs sharply from standards regimes where specifications sit behind substantial paywalls, and it has consequences beyond convenience: it lowers the barrier for small operators, for researchers, for students and for anybody wanting to check a claim rather than take it on trust.

It is worth being precise about what these documents are. They are not law and they are not contracts. Nobody is obliged to implement them and nobody is penalised for departing from them. Their authority is entirely practical: an operator that ignores the common conventions finds that its equipment cannot usefully exchange traffic with anybody else's, and that is a sufficient sanction without any enforcement mechanism at all. Compliance is bought by usefulness rather than compelled by rule.

Compare this with the two obvious alternatives. Standards set by governments carry legal force but move at the pace of intergovernmental agreement and reflect the priorities of states. Standards set by a single dominant company can move very fast but serve that company's interests and can be changed unilaterally. The open process sits between them: slower than a single firm, faster than a treaty, accountable to nobody in particular and therefore beholden to nobody in particular. Each model has advantages, and which one you prefer depends largely on what you most want protection against.