If (in an ideal world) Chrome and Firefox had said "no, we aren't implementing it" then it falls back to Netflix to stop harming users. And they need to make business so they'll make a crappy SilverLight client that breaks every other week. It's not the browser developers' fault that a several million dollar company decided to build their business model around the need for DRM.

The biggest problem with taking the principled stand is that you run into the prisoner's dilemma. And every CS student can tell you that the game theory says you should always defect, if the other parties are adversarial.

I think the biggest problem in the "browser game" is that the different free browsers often see each other as enemies and not as friendly competition. It's a shame because monocultures are what almost killed the internet in the early days, and I don't understand why we're heading back to ActiveX.