It is, of course, easy for me to say all this because saying it is the easy part. Doing it is another. But I've seen example after example after example of the problems with hoping that big companies will "do the right thing" or lobbying them to do the right thing, or just hoping that things will stay status quo.
For example, Sun carried a lot of the a11y work for the Linux desktop, until it was devoured by Oracle. That was nice, but it was a failure waiting to happen.