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This isn’t some conspiracy, it’s about money. JPEG XL is likely patent encumbered and this including it may require paying licensing fees. The companies involved can’t admit that because if they do, they’d be willfully infringing if they do end up including it at some point…

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What makes it seem probable that it is patent-encumbered? Is there something specific I can read about or is it just the track record of previous standards (starting with arithmetic encoding in the first JPEG)?

Pretty much all modern video/audio/image codecs are, look at HEIC for example.

HEIC is barely used and seems very cherry-picked to find something that IS still royalty encumbered.

>Pretty much all modern video/audio/image codecs are

The exact opposite is true. The most popular modern codecs are almost all royalty-free. WebP, AVIF, JXL are all royalty-free. VP9/AV1 are royalty-free. Opus is royalty-free.

I'm not sure why you didn't bother looking this up before commenting but JPEG XL is royalty-free and open source. There were some concerns raised well over a year ago about some specific subset of JXL's compression and they were completely settled and it's a non-issue. Google's decisions have nothing to do with paying royalties or licensing fees.

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