MP3 was not "an open standard", it was a patented technology, owned by the Fraunhofer institute and lead to hilarious lawsuits against people putting MP3 capabilities in both hardware and software without even knowing they had to pay license fees, until Fraunhofer gave up and gave MP3 to the world. And not "way back when", this is a story that didn't have a happy ending until 2017. And then only because technology had passed it by with the industry having mostly moved on to newer, better codecs.
In the US, patents don't just "run out", the patent owner has to actively not bother tweaking something trivial, filing for a new patent on top of their own while it's still active, and then start arguing that even though the old patent runs out, folks who act on that are now in violation of the new patent.
Is there any relation to this situation and how there were attempts to enforce the _patent_ (not the standard) of JPEG[1] that ultimately mostly failed?
Standards are only as open as their implementations. The fact that google isn’t really involving anyone in this and first introduced it in a closed door hush hush event makes me extremely skeptical.
A standard created by one body requires adoption by others before it can be a standard unless the first party owns the market. Implementations don't have to be open..
