[1]In an example of how becoming top dog can empower a company to influence and set industry-wide protocols, Google Earth’s KML format has been declared [2] an open standard for geographical data by the Open Geospatial Consortium (“OGC”).
It’s really great and progressive that such a large, publicly-traded company such as Google would release control of its considerable intellectual property rights and allow KML to be used by anyone.
Google’s LatLong Blog also crows a bit [3] about how KML is “the HTML of geographic content”, and explains that KML is no longer owned by Google, but is now administrated by the OGC.