VP9 is a open and royalty free video coding format. You are safe as long as you don't sue Google for VP9 patent infringements. It seems to target MPEG so that if they sue Google their license is revoked and Google can claim patents infringements as well.
That being said I take VP9 anytime over h.264. It's not only about the payment to MPEG but your license can also be revoked or not granted in the first place. How f is that compared to VP9?
Yes, but imagine you're a startup which has developed a bunch of awesome new algorithms, and patented them.
And now you want to use them in combination with VP.9.
As soon as you do, Google can use your algorithms and patents without ever paying you, and you can't sue them for it, or your product can't use VP.9 anymore.
How fucked up is that? That's a huge cost there for startups that's always treated as "free" while in reality it can be selling out your entire product for a video codec.
Something tells me that you are wrong. Just because Edge is shipped with VP9 support that doesn't mean the MS grants all the windows patents to Google, right? Of course if you want to develop a VP9++ and patent it that could be an issue but I don't think that's necessary a bad thing for the codecs industry. Last thing I want is another proprietary codec to lock the content on specific players.
