[AnthonyMouse]

> WHY would a third party come up with the best possible standard between these two (as well as maintaining it!) that they wouldn't then be compensated for?

This is the easiest one to solve, because it's not that expensive to make a decent messaging standard (Open Whisper Systems was very small, for example; solitary individuals have done it in other cases). It's not a matter of getting someone to do the work.

It's that messaging systems have a network effect, so when one comes as the default on a device with a billion users, it has a big network regardless of whether or not a competing protocol might be just as good. And then they want to lock competitors out of that network effect, which is an antitrust issue, and so here we are.