[cromwellian]

No they did not claim to have all the patents, nor do I expect Google made this assumption (there's a never ending list!), but the timing is very curious. What does Nokia really want out of this if they are not interested in licensing under any circumstances?

This is not the first time Nokia did this. IIRC, they also threatened Ogg when it was being proposed as the mandatory codec for the <video> element.

Certain companies that have large installed bases of H264 hardware certainly have a vested interested in seeing H264 as the mandatory WebRTC codec.

[GHFigs]

Has any party actually proposed h.264 being made mandatory to implement for WebRTC?

[ZeroGravitas]

Yes, Nokia, Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Ericcson, RIM, France Telecom/Orange, Qualcomm.

http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dbenham-webrtc-videomt...

IETF's royalty-free commitment isn't as strong as W3C's so unlike the HTML5 codec were they were just filibustering alternatives, they are actually arguing for H.264 to be MTI. But the VP8 camp is strong enough to at least prevent that, even if not strong enough to prevail as MTI itself.

There's some overlap with the groups that didn't want Opus made MTI as well (one of them submitted a patent against it too).