The flaw in this line of reasoning is talking about it in the past tense and referring to “the Web” as if that's some central authority distinct from the browser manufacturers which can dictate terms. EME has already shipped in Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, and Opera. The alternative was something like Apple, Google, and Microsoft hammering out an agreement privately and leaving Mozilla and possibly Opera out in the cold, stuck with either Flash or slowly bleeding users to a browser which offered a better experience.
Look at Netflix's support matrix now and notice how many people can now play movies without needing to install anything:
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
You're going to have a really hard time convincing most people that this is worse than the previous security, stability, and performance disaster of using NPAPI plugins. The vast majority of users think it's a plus that they can just search, click, and play without having to use a separate device or player application — how are you going to convince them that this should not be allowed?
Note also that this does not prevent the use of view source on netflix.com – only access to the decrypted video stream – and should any of the extremely rare browsers which you listed (several of which don't even support images or video of any sort!) decide they too wanted to support it, there's at least a standard process.
Netflix 'just worked' with Chrome but some French TV channels (looking at you M6!) are still stuck streaming Flash. Getting pipelight to work with Firefox took hours of fucking around and it still bombs on certain streams.
If we have to have DRM it's got to be preferable suffering it through an open standard rather than black boxes forced on us through shitty plugins riddled with security holes.
Looks terrible, there is no mention of Linux at all.
Again, I don't love DRM but we need a reason for a significant number of people to care. We've had a couple decades for angry nerds ranting on the Internet to show results and it's hard to say that we've done anything. The one area where DRM was rolled back is music and that was a combination of widespread unencumbered CDs and, mostly, Steve Jobs scaring the music labels more than piracy.
We need a better approach to avoid repeating that cycle of failure again. Most people think Netflix is good – what's going to make them decide to cancel their subscription?
I'd actually argue that we have. Sure, a lot of the mp3 stuff was Jobs, but I'd argue that the game was changed so that we can't do the same with mp3s. We downloaded mp3s, but we stream movies. Now, I think streaming is superior in many ways, and I'm not bashing it, but it did change the game.
Free software is becoming more and more common. Sure, it moves slower than proprietary software, but I'd argue that's a feature, not a bug. We now have MS open-sourcing a lot of stuff, and including bash in their stack. Apple is trying to become more open, and focus more on privacy. Linux is getting more games than ever.
I really view this new DRM scheme as a desperate attempt from a dying industry. And I do think eventually we'll look back, thinking it was absurd.
1. You need to pay someone for an OS in order to view the web.
2. The OS market isn't open, someone else can't just make an OS that people will use, because it can't view the web.
Was the OS market not open when Flash for Linux didn't exist? FreeBSD? TempleOS?
What percentage of content needs to use EME before you “can't view the web”? If everything else but Netflix works, is the web open or closed?
More to the point, what do you expect to accomplish here – is hyperbole going to convince people to use Linux, cancel their Netflix/Amazon/etc. subscription, etc? If not, I would again suggest finding an argument which will appeal to a non-trivial number of people. Why should they care enough to change their spending or contact their representatives?
If the EME are part of the HTML5 standard, but in practice they require some proprietary blob to operate, then the web isn't completely open. It doesn't mean that it's completely closed. Whether that matters depends, I suppose, on whether you want to take a pragmatic or ideological stance.
> More to the point, what do you expect to accomplish here
Does a complaint have to be a call to action?
> If not, I would again suggest finding an argument which will appeal to a non-trivial number of people.
I don't think an argument, as such, will sway many people. If EME (or similar closed technologies) cause enough problems for enough people (for some definition of "enough"), that will change peoples' opinions. Things have to get really, really bad before most people will ask for change.
The OS market wouldn't be open anyway, because it naturally forms a monopoly/oligopoly.
That support matrix seems to be "Windows or OSX". If you want to make an encryption standard which works on Windows and OSX, why not get Microsoft and Apple around a table to hammer out an OS service/library?
Sounds easier than getting Microsoft (IE/Edge), Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Mozilla and Opera around a table to do the same thing at the browser level.
Also: Firefox is quite capable of following Apple, Microsoft and Google. The idea that MozCorp is not a Corp isn't right either.
So whilst "the web should not support rights management and voluntarily cede such content to other platforms" is a perfectly reasonable argument, I don't think the sanctity of View Source or Mozilla is a supporting point in favour.
> View Source is already useless on most large sites
No it isn't. Web devs can easily read source on almost all sites all the time.
> Modern web sources aren't meant to be read by humans
Yes they are - that why we've got view-source.
> and it's really only one or two steps above being handed a compiled binary.
That's the point - it's NOT compiled binary.
The sanctity of View Source is exactly what's in question here, and I stand in the group that says "no" to closed-source web specifications.
So, uhh, I tried to view-source on a gmail tab. A solid wall of code. There's nothing there meaningful, not like the web pages of 1999 used to be.
If you're telling me you can browse the wall of code on a site like gmail.com and learn new tips and tricks from it, well, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Some sites are pushing shitty, hard to read code, sure. But instead of allowing them to continue working against the spirit of the system, we should shame them, and use them as examples of what not to do. If a couple of bad politicians abuse their system, we don't say "fuck it. lets go back to a monarchy"
Heck I picked the front page of BBC News and opened it up. Wall of minified JS. Further down the page we see something that vaguely resembles normal HTML except for stuff like this:
<div id=markets_index_promo class="hidden" data-comp-meta="{"id":"markets_index_promo","type":"remote-portlet","handler":"remotePortlet","deviceGroups":null,"opts":{"assetId":"10263779","id":"market_data\/markets_index_promo","loading_strategy":"post_load","position_info":{"instanceNo":1,"positionInRegion":3,"lastInRegion":false,"lastOnPage":false,"column":"secondary_column"}}}">
Modern web sources are also made by people out for money and/or marketing, who by now even seem to have forgotten about graceful degradation and other things that would slow them down.
You don't ask IKEA what the best wood for a solid table is, what means "best" for them has to do with money and the ability to produce in bulk, while a carpenter who worked with all sorts of wood and isn't bothered about those restraints as much will give you a completely different answer. That's kind of how the web became, because IKEA is making more money with selling tables than master carpenters, or even just because they occured later chronologically, because they are "more modern" (which says nothing about quality and only something about time), they are now somehow seen as experts on tables.
It's interesting that in some ways today's JS heavy client apps are more open than similar server side apps from even just a couple years ago: obfuscated code is still viewable client side and browsers are good at providing deminified views in browser dev tools, and if sourcemaps are left in then you can jump directly to the unobfuscated/deminified sources in browser dev tools. Plus, most communications between chunky JS apps and their servers increasingly use friendly REST protocols, which again is its own sort of win for discoverability and friendliness to an informed user poking around inside of how things work.
:)
As far as I see it, EME would only be a loss for the Web and browser makers like Mozilla; in a similar way to, for example, losing the ability to "view source" would be a loss.
I think the real threat is from commercial entities who want EME for entirely separate reasons, i.e. Apple, Microsoft and Google, who also just-so-happen to make browsers. They can embrace/extend/extinguish the Web, by building an encryption standard into their particular browsers which none of the countless others are able to do (Firefox, Konqueror, Dillo, Netsurf, W3M, Lynx, EWW, Elinks, etc.). EME seems like an attempt to preempt such a situation, but I don't see how it can do anything to prevent it.
This is a much worse situation than some set-top box scenario, since it will bleed users from all browsers to those few with EME+plugins, and the Web will become yet another Microsoft Office document format.