The fact that Google is willing to steamroll over consensus with its market power even in the face of technical arguments is precisely the problem here.
> Why should Google's product roadmap be subject to a consensus of their competitors?
...because they're attempting to shape standards around their product roadmap, in committees in which their competitors also participate?
You can tell your competitors to go fuck themselves and do whatever you want with your roadmap, or you can make standards promulgation and compliance a part of your roadmap, but you don't get to have your cake and eat it too.
These working groups are working groups second, and political battlegrounds first. I think the pace of the WHATWG has proven the futility of such working groups.
We see this time and time again, with various technologies. It's never worked well. And if Apple were doing this, 3/4 of this website would be cheering them on even though Apple's been pretty bad about this sort of thing historically.
Microsoft apologists asked the same thing in the late 90s and early 00s. That did not end well for anybody. So here are your answers: 1. because it's a douche move, and 2. because it's bad for the platform and bad for just about everybody.
Other than the one who ends up with a monopolistic lock-in over the whole system for half a decade, maybe.
I feel like the Microsoft comparison is a little unfair. I doubt anyone would have complained much if IE and ActiveX were open source projects distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Given that ActiveX was something that by design wouldn't have worked on non-Windows machines (since it was, if I remember correctly, pretty tightly tied into COM/services stuff) - I'm pretty sure it being open source wouldn't have changed anything.
