A standards organization that charges a yearly fee of as much as $100,000 per subscriber to organize the standards around passive RFID.
The value
Wal-Mart, DoD, and Target all contribute to this organization to make a single standard for RFID. Since the creation of EPC Gen2, prices for passive RFID chips have dropped from $1.50+ each to under $0.20 each. Meanwhile rfid read ranges have increased from 10' to nearly 100'.
EPC Global publishes the UHF EPC Class 1 Generation 2 (Gen2) specification that encompasses nearly all passive RFID applications.