For Google, the need to use open technologies was paramount in this effort, because it would allow anyone to use the technology without prior approval. "This approach has worked wonders for the [W]eb, and we hope for the same result with WebRTC," Uberti wrote. "Given the ability to deliver a royalty-free platform with no compromises on quality, we see no reason to include mandatory royalty-bearing codecs."

Other participants have their doubts though. A representative from mobile equipment provider Ericsson for the more widely used H.264 codec as the mandatory codec, or at least include H.264 as one of mandatory codecs.

H.264, often packaged in the MPEG-4 container, is used by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Flash and others. Chip manufacturers such as Intel and Texas Instruments offer processors or add-on chips to speed H.264 decoding, thereby making the format appealing to power-sensitive mobile device manufacturers.

Use of H.264, however, requires developers to license the technology, which Google , and others have railed against. "Non-free MTI codecs would be a massive problem for Linux/BSD [distributions] and other open source projects, as well as Mozilla," Mozilla WebRTC tech lead Randell Jesup.

In a sense, Google's stance is part of a larger split in the Web community over which video codecs should be included as part of the official HTML5 standard. Here, Google has offered VP8, and has gotten support from Mozilla and Opera, while Microsoft, Apple and others have put their weight behind H.264.