I don't really blame them though. The US government allows software patents and has a terrible patent system that massively favours entrenched interests and blessed the MPEG patent pool which created the current mess. (Bear in mind that the US government spent most of the 20th century breaking up patent pools because they were anti-competitive).

People say "there's too many patents around video codecs" but no one stops to ask why. The answer is because anyone who gets a patent into MPEG gets an equal cut of the profits, doesn't matter how small, useless or even counter-productive your idea is. It all adds to the patent thicket that prevents competition.

How can anyone say with a straight face that they are choosing a bureaucratic monopoly because quality is so important to them?

The "invisible hand" that turns corporate self-interest into something socially beneficial only works when there is free competition and erecting barriers to entry (by excluding those who can't or won't pay patent fees) is by definition anti-competitive.

This is why countries like China are pushing for royalty-free standards. Even communist countries understand that open standards and competition are a benefit.

In your last post, you said: "Anti-competitive actions are always pragmatic if you're not going to get punished for them." From this, I conclude that when you say "anti-competitive", you are referring to actions that ought to be punished. Then, I asked if it was anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests instead of aiding competitors, to which you say yes.

From this, I conclude that you are saying that acting in one's own self-interest instead of aiding competitors ought to be punished.

Where have I made a mistake?

erecting barriers to entry (by excluding those who can't or won't pay patent fees)

I don't understand. Native h.264 support is not mandatory for competition or spec compliance. h.264 patent fees, and Mozilla's inability/choice to not pay them only constrain what they implement. It does not prevent them from competing or from adhering to the spec.

For a counter-example, Mozilla was the driving force behind having Theora made a mandatory part of the spec, which would have excluded any parties who couldn't or wouldn't implement it. Would that have been anti-competitive?

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.

I agree. We undoubtedly disagree on what things and in what ways, but I don't think the current systems and organizations are operating at their best, either. On most aspects of the larger problems am very undecided, but I have a particular bee in my bonnet over this issue because I strongly disagree with Mozilla's handling of the situation.

standards were a previously successful tool to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in

They still are. That's why we're talking about a single (albeit broad) format called "h.264", which dozens of vendors support and not dozens of different competing locked-in formats.

but they have since been captured by the very organisations they were meant to regulate

I'm not sure what you mean by this. To my knowledge, the primary participants in the relevant standards bodies have always been the same ones cross-licensing their IP. That would seem to make sense: You can't have interoperable standards if the parties won't share what they have, and the most reliable way of getting someone to share what they have is to give them something in return.

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.

I disagree. Making any codec mandatory means mandating risk. In a standard, this means implementors agreeing to take on that risk--but the parties involved in HTML5 have not agreed to take on the risk of any codec. Why they choose not to is irrelevant from the viewpoint of authoring a standard. There is no sense in publishing a standard that is full of stuff which isn't actually standard. Trying to alter reality by altering the spec would not work regardless of patents -- it would just make otherwise compliant parties non-compliant, to no end but smug satisfaction.

(It's worth noting here that h.264 was never mandated by the spec. The parties that implement it have done so for their own reasons, without being mandated.)

Without that patent threat there is no substantive reason to not implement Theora (or any potential VP8 derived codec).

The same is true of h.264, with the essential difference that licensing allows the risk to be managed, even without patent reform. As in, today. If we had to hold up all progress until the messy problems of international IP law had been solved, h.264 would be patent-free by the time we were finished.

And this on top of the fact that there is very little technical or economic reason to implement Theora. It's just not that useful.

the groups who have refused to implement Theora have done so primarily because of influence brought to bear on them by MPEG-LA

On what evidence do you make this claim?

No you didn't. The question you asked was, and I quote: "You're saying it's anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests rather than go out of their way to support their competitors?" Note you used supporting, a passive role, rather than aiding, which is active. To state the obvious: your mistake was assuming that the process of synonymy strictly preserves meaning, which isn't the case.

Note that I used "go out of their way to support". The active role was clearly implied, and consistent with the context.

ZeroGravitas described Apple and Microsoft's choice (to use h.264) as an "anti-competitive action", and in contrasting that choice with an alternative, I thought it was obvious that I meant choosing (acting) differently, i.e. using Theora, in spite of it not being in their own interests. What else might I have meant?

If we were talking about a passive role of "supporting", then Apple (and possibly Microsoft) would have to be excluded, as their <video> implementation (at least on the desktop) allows for installing additional third-party codecs, such as Theora. In that sense Apple supports Theora, but clearly that is not what we're talking about.

I know of no other sense in this context that Apple or Microsoft could support Mozilla without also aiding them.

(The reason I stated this initially in terms of "going out of their way" was to distinguish this situation from situations in which self-interested competitors benefit each other directly, such as how Apple's work on WebKit benefited Google's work on Chrome (and vice versa). There was no argument made to suggest that choosing Theora would have been in the interests of Microsoft or Apple, though, so this was (I thought) redundant, hence the change.)

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