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by EGreg 3203 days ago
Wait, what? Perhaps you are right, but how do you make the leap from "W3C standardizes DRM" and "the Web is about to be eaten by DRM?"

The Web is used for so many things these days. It is a publishing platform that allows anyone to host their own content to the entire internet, thanks to Web Browsers just loading it. I can see IPFS being an improvement over the Web but besides the web server being a single point of failure, why is a DRM standard specifically going to destroy the Web?

Wordpress is used to power 20% of new sites. My own company is developing an open source platform for communities to run their own social networks (https://qbix.com) so what is this "eating" you speak of?

EDIT: This has been one of my most downvoted comments ever. Can someone explain the rationale? (Is it super obvious that the Web will be killed by DRM that asking the question should be punished?)

1 comments

DRM and webassembly. The end of openness in both cases—though at least WebAssembly means we eventually won't have to write Javascript anymore, which is nice as far as that goes.

Sure, Javascript uglifiers and frameworks mucking with HTML standards and the DOM had already made "view source" nigh-worthless, and there were DRM'd plugins of course, and browsers had supported some schemes for a while as a de facto standard, but this still feels like a last-straw kind of situation to me.

> My own company is developing an open source platform for communities to run their own social networks (https://qbix.com) so what is this "eating" you speak of?

Sure, it's already the world's premiere delivery mechanism for "apps", advertisements, and mass surveillance software. I know. That's exactly the kind of thing that I don't mind living somewhere, but I'd like it not to be all mixed up in my networked hypertext document reader.

This Web's over. Anyone hosting an After-Web? I could do with a little more Webbing.

[EDIT] Though actually your thing seems fine. I saw "social network" and glossed over the rest. Sorry.

Bookmarking this page in hope of having some alternatives. I'm even ready to throw some money/programming hours to any serious projects