The issue would be with AV1 itself, because the investigation is about standards-essential patents (SEP) and the whole point of AV1 is to be royalty-free. If th

The issue would be with AV1 itself, because the investigation is about standards-essential patents (SEP) and the whole point of AV1 is to be royalty-free. If the EU decides that AOM violated competition rules to get blanket licenses to AV1 SEP, then that would (presumably) wipe away the SEP owner's obligations to reciprocally license those patents to new implementers. Then we're right back in the same overlapping-patent-pool hell that made H.265 so ludicrously expensive to license.