[hardwaresofton]

This article made me wonder if I should cancel my Netflix account. I still see them as a "good guy" (and haven't really considered it heavily until now) because of how straight forward and valuable their offering is, the contributions they make to the open source community, and their general underdog-ness in comparison to the entrenched cable industry. They just don't seem to be overtly evil, they seem to be making a fair amount of consumer and even business environment-friendly decisions (they're running a profitable business, not using VC money to suck the air from the market).

I don't know that I blame Netflix as much as I blame the W3C for being spineless/bending to their will. It's absolutely Netflix's perogative to seek the most money, and to try to force their users into apps if that's how they can do so, but the W3C should have been different/stopped it. From my understanding that's the point of a standards body like that (and like the article states, it's in purported reason they were founded at all).

In the end, I'm not as dissapointed with the W3C because the world just isn't that cut and dry most of the time (and browsers still at least give you the option to turn EME off), but

[saladeen]

These new-style tech companies have become very good at keeping the underdog/one-with-the-masses image while slowly turning into market-cornering behemoths the likes of Bell. Netflix is just following the Google's playbook IMO.

Also: this duality was why I was suspicious of the end result of the Net Neutrality (as opposed to net neutrality) in discussions couple days ago and I got completely shredded. People should be more critical of everything and not fall for feel-good phrases by faceless corps.