And the reason H.264 is successful is not because of its superior quality. It's because MPEG-LA has companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Canon, Nikon which means H.264 is supported from capture to editing to publishing to viewing.
Though they have patents in the H.264 pool that MPEG LA licenses, Microsoft has said it pays MPEG LA twice as much in royalties to ship H.264-enabled products than it receives in royalty payments back. And Apple has only a single patent in the H.264 pool, so it appears its interests in H.264 and MPEG LA are not directly financial.
You seem to be arguing that standards prevent competition. When in fact they cause it to flourish.
To put it into one sentence: A standard should NEVER ever be controlled/represented/defended by a group of companies with monetary interests.
If you have a monetary interest in upholding a standard it is clear that you will try to prevent competition.
You mean like VP8/WebM by Google?
You try and fork H.264 you get sued.
The fundamental freedom in "open" is freedom to fork. Everyone forgets that.
The reason Apple and MS are ok with H.264 is that they are large and can easily absorb the cost, but it is harder for new players in the marketplace to do that, and harder for people at the cheaper end of the market where margins are much thinner. (There are other reasons too of course, like engineering time already invested in H.264, hardware support on millions of devices already shipped etc etc).
If you want to get anywhere with your argument then you are going to have to convince people at Apple and Microsoft and others. Calling them liars and dreaming up conspiracy theories about how they are going to make billions from MPEG-LA revenues won't help you convince them. Trying to publicly shame them with bad publicity isn't working and never had much chance of working because very few regular people care that Mozilla or Ubuntu might have to pay royalties for video codecs.
Final word of advice: move development out of the US. There are plenty of countries that don't recognise software patents. Remember the crypto situation? The answer there was to move crypto development outside the US. Make software patents into an argument about "US Jobs", and you will have a much easier time convincing legislators. At the moment they are being told that software patents protect US jobs, and that argument is always going to trump more ethereal ones about fair competition and freedom.
Given that licensing isn't broken out or even mentioned in their market conference calls gives you a pretty good indication that it is a pretty insignificant amount.