The problems trying to develop a royalty-free video standard at ISO might be instructive here. MPEG floated a standard called IVC (Internet Video Coding) that w

The problems trying to develop a royalty-free video standard at ISO might be instructive here. MPEG floated a standard called IVC (Internet Video Coding) that was specifically designed to only use Option 1[0] patented inventions. After it was published they got a bunch of Option 2[1] declarations that effectively killed the standard. ISO doesn't actually require patent holders to declare what patents are being infringed if they are making an Option 2 offer, so there's no means to actually redesign the spec to not use those patents. I'd like to introduce you to a man named Leonardo Chiariglione - co-founder of MPEG, if not the entire concept of FRAND patent pools. He has a rather long blog post from 2018 detailing ISO's growing patent problems here: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/ https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... The ending of this story is that Leonardo was fired or forced out about two years ago, and MPEG is dead - or, more accurately, cut into like five different pieces. There's a bunch of patent holders who are angry that patent revenues have fallen since the MPEG-2 days, angry that H.264 has zero-cost licensing for certain industries, and are deliberately trying to break the whole FRAND licensing system with conflicting H.265 patent pools to try and extort more money out of codec implementers. Leonardo tried to make ISO aware of this and several unnamed national entities vetoed him. My conspiratorial guess is that one of those national entities is the EU, or perhaps ECMA[2]; being lobbied on by the same companies that gave us Velos Media and/or Access Advance. Those same people are probably whispering sweet nothings in the EU regulators' ears. "Look, Google is trying to use their market power to not pay for video codec patents![3] Ignore all the other sketchy stuff we're doing on the other end." [0] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to license them on a royalty-free basis [1] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to join a patent pool [2] Can you tell I have limited knowledge of how ISO is organized? [3] Leonardo himself actually also believes this and is arguably more opposed to AOM than the EU regulators are. EDIT: I probably should also include another link to Leonardo's blog: https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-obtuse-story/ https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-o...