For one, it would've helped if Firefox didn't drop the ball in the late-00s, when Chrome became the de facto best browser around. Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing. Having the very same companies that make browsers vested in certain web features is a big no-no, but that cat's already out of the bag.
I'm not really sure if we can put it back in.
I'm not sure that's really true. Do you remember the bad old IE days? Half the web was simply broken on non-Microsoft operating systems, because Microsoft refused to follow standards.
They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement. And despite all that effort, we often never managed to do it - cough _ActiveX_ cough.
The situation back then was much, much worse than today in terms of open standards and cross-browser (let alone cross-OS) compatibility. And that was pretty much Microsoft's fault.
Google and Chrome have lots of problems. But they build on top of Chromium, which is completely open source. It does not have 100% of the features of Chrome, but from a practical perspective that seems to be mostly a non-issue, at least for me.
One example is XHR, which is probably the single defining feature of the modern web.
Good standards simply codify whatever "proprietary" features we've found are useful.
But Google has done more lasting damage I think. The effects are more subtle, things work. ...The way Google wants. We may never know what was crushed or lost by submitting to Google’s will. So the harm will be less visible.
It is like a kid just a saw a few rounds of cross fire than ran and tell the world how is was like World War 2.
The reason people pay is the convenience! The DRM isn't required for that. If they dropped all DRM tomorrow, they would lose far fewer subscriber dollars than they spend on DRM implementations, license servers, key management, etc. They're just greedy, want control, and want to keep it illegal to break out of that control.
Meanwhile, any media "purchases" you make are gone in a blink if the company you bought them from goes out of business or just decides they don't feel like offering the service anymore. The funny thing is that most of the buy-to-"own" (where you don't actually own it) prices are similar to the cost of a DVD or blu-ray disc. Ditto for Kindle books and their paperback counterparts. All the promises of digital distribution giving consumers lower prices were predictable lies.
Regarding purchases and licensing, those are still stuck in the same business model and pricing as in the analogue days, this is true. But saying overall consumer prices are the same is ridiculous, since all-you-can-eat content subscriptions is a massive transition with no comparable offerings in the analogue past.
If you want to culturally enrich people, there has never been a better time to consume huge amounts of quality stuff for barely any money.
Take your example. In 2020 there are already many ways that video can be decoded simply, efficiently and with excellent quality. We don't need to accept marginal user experience improvement at the cost of simplicity. So we don't accept changes to the standards at the expense of cost implementation complexity.
It's about having a different mantra. Instead of an emphasis on backwards compatibility and bleeding edge user experience, there's an emphasis on a democracy by simplicity.
Each of the two standards might not receive enough attention on their own, but they complement each other: getting rid of the necessity of ads means going lite is an option for website owners, and the lite web will allow for many different lite web clients (that might finance itself through in-app ads shown to the user). In combination these two might overcome some threshold and gain traction!
One day Intel goes and implements instructions which support video decoding. And then Microsoft takes advantage of them, and now users have a better experience. Now open source compilers have to implement them and AMD has to implement them and the cost of competing with the giants goes up.
Same thing with browser DRM. Either Firefox implements it, or Netflix tells all of their users that chrome is a requirement.
I don't know how to stop this type of creep.