Money is necessary. IP rights are a general and flexible tool to funnel money into research.

AV1 is basically funded by Google as a quasi-charitable endeavor, as far as I can tell. Whilst there may be several apparent funders like Mozilla, they in turn trace their funding to Google.

"Research funding by Google" is never going to be a tactic that policymakers take seriously, and rightly so, even if it happens to be doing a lot of good work in this particular time period.