RE: Royalty Based Standards

The use of "royalty based standards" is a bad idea in an OPEN
environment such as the internet. The equipment people use to drive the
connectivity of the internet is already far over priced as it is. If you
attempt to implement standards which have a patented piece attatched to
it, you may very well splinter the already fragemented standards of the
internet. The difference here is that the W3C are looked at as an
organization people hate or people love. I don't know of an in-between.
I believe that while the decision to do this might help the W3C in the
short term, it would most certainly breed bad practice into the already
too commercialized internet. That, coupled with turning people from
loving W3C into those that hate the W3C because of the long term
reactions this would have, could very well spell the end for the W3C as
a respected Standards organization. If that were to happen, the ISO or
IETF might just very well take over your duties. If it could be done in
a way which was not only acceptable to business, but to the end users of
the internet as a whole, and actually see useful, accountable standards,
NOT more P3P stuff, and the W3C was charged with enforcing those
standards on companies, LIKE MICROSOFT(P3P again), then everyone might
just benefit as a whole. 
Thanks for listening. 
Austin
Systems Architect, CCNA
Coremetrics, Inc.