I am lost in this debate. If the decoder is a paid for plugin. Then it makes sense for it not to be shipped. Why can't Google buy out the h.264 tech and give

I am lost in this debate. If the decoder is a paid for plugin. Then it makes sense for it not to be shipped. Why can't Google buy out the h.264 tech and give it to us all? Why do we need the video tag anyway? Doesn't it make more sense to use existing codecs that already sit on the system? Why bundle the codecs in the browser, wouldn't it be better to work on a common architecture that can interface with codecs?