| I wish more were done to push back against this consolidation of power by these platforms. We're like frogs that have been stoking the fuel of our own pot. It used to be that DRM was considered to be in conflict with the browser, because it was not acting on behalf of the user. If you must have DRM, then it is on the platform to shoehorn it in through an external plugin, like Silverlight. When Firefox adopted EME extensions, I knew it was the beginning of the end; they were rolling out the red carpet for DRM. If we make DRM a switch that can simply be thrown, then it will become the norm, not the exception. And there have been proposals for years to DRM fonts and other absurdities. If a company insists on using DRM, then they should have to shoulder the burden of doing something that a browser was never support to support. The nightmare that we're racing toward is you will only be permitted to cache a trickle of video at a time and your TPM attestation hardware must include a token in every HTTP request. Your browser will just be a software cablebox. They aren't happy about URLs either and would love to require that if you want to share a reference to something, you have to do it on their terms, like generating a url in their app with a hash that expires and limited in how many times it can be viewed. I'm sure influencers will still have the privilege of unlimited sharing. They've been slowly rolling this infrastructure out for the last decade. These are not isolated inconveniences, these are coffin nails. |
The alternative is that people complain "netflix doesn't work on firefox", switch to chrome instead, which is even worse.