Balloons can go quite a bit higher, the current amateur record is just above 40km. But even so, you can't beat a rocket for sheer style :-)

would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud

Is "the Internet" really so difficult to say or type?

and install the codec to view the content to

From where? That would mean I'd have to keep an up-to-date list of all the places to get the WebM codec for all the various platforms that my visitors might be using, if one even exists. I don't mind other codecs being supported through whatever framework is available to the user - but there should always be at least one common codec that can be relied upon being present, regardless of platform.

and it's worth noting that there are some concerns as to whether or not this standard would survive an IP infringement claim, making it less "free" than we're asked to assume

The same applies to H.264.

MPEGLA has applied an exemption to source code for quite some time

I don't think it's a matter of them 'exempting' it, they simply can't do anything about source code.