Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

I think the idea that the article is “hating” or “blaming” Mozilla for anything is just a little bit overdoing it. To say the least. The article goes out of its way to empathise with and respect the Mozilla position.

If companies didn't act in their own interests there wouldn't be competition!

Can I suggest to you that, if they were not barred from doing so by law, any rational and profit driven business would eventually merge with all its market rivals to form a monopoly and extract monopoly rents? I think the facts of history are on my side here (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act).

I am suggesting (in line with what I thought were the commonly accepted tenets of free market capitalism) that their self-interest be channelled, not that this motive is intrinsically bad, just that it is not intrinsically good since externalities and market failures can be exploited in the name of corporate self-interest without any compensating benefit to society.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." -- Adam Smith

Dear Apple, Microsoft, and Google: Please don't kill HTML5 Video. ("Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!")

In an ideal world businesses would not behave anti-competitively and this would have great benefits for society.

In this particular real world you can't micromanage like that, and you'd end up with bad government if you even tried, but still companies are punished for the anti-competitive actions which are big or bad enough to be worth prosecuting, and are generally expected to refrain from doing so all by themselves. (Often they are encouraged to self-regulate by the threat of intrusive mandated regulation.)

I personally would prefer it if patents, standards bodies and a few other such institutions were reformed to encourage greater competition and prevent anti-competitive behaviour.

In the particular case of H.264 there are a range of problems with the current system, even before you bring web standards and browsers into the picture. Basically patents plus network effects are a bad mix and MPEG has the whole world on a patent upgrade treadmill. Ironically, standards were a previously successful tool to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in, but they have since been captured by the very organisations they were meant to regulate.

Making any royalty-free standard mandatory (e.g. Theora) is only an issue because of potential patent claims from trolls in general or MPEG-LA members specifically. This can and should be fixed in the patent system (e.g. China have announced plans to compulsorily licence patents that have claims on mandated standards, some US legal authorities suggest that it be your responsibility to notify standards bodies of patent issues or else you lose your patent rights, many EU member states don't consider MPEG "open" standards because they require royalties and so can't be used by government). Without that patent threat there is no substantive reason to not implement Theora (or any potential VP8 derived codec).

My own understanding is, even with the vagueness of the current patent system, that the groups who have refused to implement Theora have done so primarily because of influence brought to bear on them by MPEG-LA which makes any suggestion of anti-competitiveness of Theora circular since it relies on the existence of an anti-competive body which is using its power to prevent implementations of rival codecs.