Is there any company, big or small, that is doing more for the Internet than Google?<p>In fact, they may have already done more than any other company ever.<p>This acquisition, plus what's going on with pubsubhubbub over the past few weeks, will really go a long way to putting the network back in our hands.
They paid for the patents, not the codecs, much less the terrible implementations.<p>Each generation of codec implementations uses a lot of the same techniques, most of which are patented by <i>somebody</i>. Google can take On2's patents and license them freely under the condition that licensees must not bring patent infringement suits against anyone else.<p>They could suck a lot of air out of the debate, on both the freetard and patent-troll sides.