That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already

That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format. Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.