I'm pretty libertarian, but for things like standards and formats, I really think the government should be stepping in and taking control. Standards, formats, and basic internet access are the new "roads" of the modern world. Commerce can flourish when we aren't fighting over them.
Even for something R&D heavy like video codecs. How much money are we dumping into the NSA right now? Use some of that.
There doesn't need to be control taken; instead, the government could just buy the patents to the best codecs and open them up. Software infrastructure, if you will.
It's sad and ironic that Google is doing this more effectively than We The People, it least in cases where their interests are aligned with the commons.
Which government institution should decide on the video codec for everyone to use? How would they know when it's time to switch? I cannot see that working any better than MPEG and MPEG-LA.
That institution probably does not exist. The Federal and State governments are still trying to figure out what an Internet is. This isn't even on their radar.
For codecs, the government would not even need to regulate. As long as the offerings are good, the industry would be compelled to adopt them because of the lack of licensing costs and for the long term stability. Continuous R&D would still be necessary.
Well, for cryptographic hashes the relevant institution in the US is NIST and they switch at a point when there start to be worries about the previous hash being subject to successful attacks sometime in the future.
There's no reason in principle that the same approach, again with NIST as the relevant institurion, could not be used for video codecs.
It would be better than the MPEG-LA because the patent situation could be made much simpler (e.g. automatic patent licenses would be granted to all implementors of the standard).
Do you want Web "standards and formats" to last as long as NTSC did? Imagine using IE6 for the next 50 years. That's what government involvement will get us.
Which is why the US and EU governments are fighting against Google, Samsung and HTC who are abusing FRAND obligations and undermining the concept of standards.
Even for something R&D heavy like video codecs. How much money are we dumping into the NSA right now? Use some of that.