[freedomben]

Indeed, that's the endgame. End-to-end DRM, and there's enough money behind it that it will happen. I've been advocating heavily against DRM for many years now and nobody cares. Occassionally when somebody has a need in the moment where they are annoyed, and I explain "you can't share <thing> with your spouse/sibling/friend because DRM" they will say something like, "oh yeah, that's annoying" but just continue paying for DRM-ed media.

Unless perhaps people boycott, but that sure ain't gonna happen (in anywhere near large enough numbers to make a difference), Apple, Google, and Microsoft will build it into their platforms, and anyone not on the big three will be unable to consume more and more as time goes on, including most web browsing. It won't happen overnight. It will be an iterative/progressive encroachment where just a little changes each day. Boiling frogs and all that.

[aqfamnzc]

Who knows, maybe the climax of the advertising/drm war will result in an ideological split of the Internet:

On the one side: Big tech. E2E DRM, Chromium is the only browser engine sites will respond to, unavoidable and unblockable ads, siloed content and whitelisted domains only. Verified real identities. Linux clients and VPN IPs completely banned or pushed to captcha hell.

The rebels: Fediverse, the small web, fringe projects, experimentation, perhaps some "indie" ads. (And the problems that come with it: Spam, scraping, etc.)

I know which part I'd like to participate in.