[kelnos]

That's pretty unlikely. If Flash (and Silverlight) died and browsers didn't have anything built-in, the studios/distributors would just get together and form a company to build a new plugin that does the job. Or worse, we'd have several competing implementations.

Regardless of which of these occurs, you can bet that they wouldn't bother to sandbox the implementations, and we'd end up with the same security issues we had with Flash.

If browser vendors don't want to play ball (NPAPI is dying/dead, PPAPI and NativeClient are Chrome-only, etc.), then forget about in-browser video: they'd just build native apps instead. And maybe that's not a bad outcome for people who want the web to remain pure, but as a practical matter and a person who runs Linux, I like being able to run Netflix on my laptop.

I'm completely flabbergasted that people seem to believe that DRM would somehow magically disappear if the W3C hadn't been willing to discuss EME.

[Veedrac]

You're looking at this as black and white, when reality doesn't work that way. It being infeasible to completely remove DRM from everything doesn't mean there isn't value in discouraging its use. And that's exactly what economic and practical incentives would do if including DRM meant they lost users.