Yes, but what are we arguing about here really? I've never said monopolies are good or that MPEG having competition was bad, just that MPEG did a decent job of developing widely used standards at the time and the (still patented) web codecs came decades later, funded by monopoly profits. The alternative to MPEG's pooling and standards wasn't AV1 in 1990, it was RealVideo, Apple Video, Sorensen Spark and quite possibly single vendor lockin for all digital video, as happened with operating systems.