There’s no downside --- other laws are treated the same way.
Mendelson 14 – Joseph L. Sax Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, J.D. from Yale University.
Nina Mendelson, “Private Control over Access to Public Law: The Perplexing Federal Regulatory Use of Private Standards,” Michigan Law Scholarship Repository, 03-01-2014, https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/887/
Full digital access without charge, beyond what is available at governmental depository libraries, would place access to IBR standards on the same footing as other federal regulations. (This sort of access would not necessarily preclude SDOs from selling books of standards, much as the Government Printing Office continues to sell bound reference sets of the CFR.) The current read-only access to these standards occasionally provided at the option of SDOs and on SDO websites is insufficient. The SDOs typically claim the right to revoke this access at will, and no enforceable commitments assure ongoing access.357