To be fair to MPEG, they don't actually run the patent pools, they just make everyone promise to join one. MPEG-LA is the patent pool that everyone was using a

To be fair to MPEG, they don't actually run the patent pools, they just make everyone promise to join one. MPEG-LA is the patent pool that everyone was using and it was assumed that would be the case for H.265. HEVC Advance and Velos Media realized they could break this business structure by giving a few net-implementer companies (e.g. Samsung) a sweetheart deal on patent licensing if they moved their patents over to their pool. They paid for this by double-charging people who were already licensed through MPEG-LA for those patents. Leonardo Chiariglione, co-founder of MPEG, tried to get ISO to change their patent policy to allow more scrutiny of patent ownership in standards. ISO responded by... denying Leonardo's petitions, cutting MPEG up into pieces, and pushing him out of the working group he built. Funny thing is, MPEG actually knows royalty-free video encoding is a thing people want. They've tried building an ISO standard for that. Problem is, ISO's patent policy only allows removing patented technology from a standard if the technology is not licensable - not if the technology is too expensive. So their standardized royalty-free codecs[0] are not actually royalty-free and nobody uses them. The underlying problem was pointed out by Leonardo on his blog: patent owners want to go back to the days of charging an arm and a leg for MPEG-2, and they are willing to suck the brains out of MPEG in order to do it, under the assumption that people were paying royalty fees for the ISO branding rather than for the technical superiority of the standard. MPEG is not the cause of this problem, they are a victim of it. [0] Fun fact: Google outright just submitted VP8 to MPEG as a candidate for MPEG IVC, but they decided against using it in favor of building their own royalty-free standard.