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Horse shit.

If the spec forbade "the" codec, the offending vendors will simply violate the spec and claim some kind of justification for it.

Yes, we're complaining to the wrong people. No, going to the W3C is not the answer.

I tend to think that if we can get people to stop using h.264 for anything, then freer codecs could gain traction - particularly On2's (now Google's) VP8.

Or, taking the bigger perspective, we should be complaining to the US Congress: patents are the problem, not Microsoft's choice in codecs. If there were no patents to license, this wouldn't be an issue at all.