This Web's about to be eaten by DRM and WebAssembly anyway. Pretty soon it'll just be a way to deliver QT apps (or some other framework that runs in WebAssembly and renders to OpenGL or similar) and video. A web where the only thing you'll find when you follow a link is more documents (or a download) and pages can't try to make your computer do a bunch of stuff you don't want it to would be nice to have again, and it's clear now that the system itself has to ban the capabilities that enable all the garbage, or it'll take over.
Me too. There will be dozens of us.
I dunno, it just seems like common sense at this point. Javascript is a powerful attack vector, like ads. And many people already use adblockers in some capacity, for that kind of reason.
It'll definitely suck as HTML5's various peripheral features become strong and widely-used attack vectors.
Server-side rendering is a mature technology, don't measure it's pervasiveness in how often you see articles in the news about it...
You didn’t say that, you said “server side rendering is basically dead”.
Believe it or not, lots of people are still building things without JavaScript front ends.
Removing JavaScript prevents malware and adware vendors from running their programs on our machines, but it doesn't empower users. We can control or data but we still can't analyze data websites give us.
The way forward, I think, is to create more standardized document types and let people build renderers for them. If I go to a cookbook website, I should be able to download recipe documents. If I don't like how my cookbook program renders the recipe, I should be able to download another program can render it. This breaks the power that websites have as the sole entities with the capability to render their documents, and gives the power back to users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13214134
"""
I'm not sure this goal is very practical, even in the toy example you used (being able to swap data sources for weather forecasts).
If you can use a common vocabulary to access multiple APIs, that requires that all APIs implement the same feature set. Which means getting the API sources to agree on the features to implement, and how to describe them, and stop them from adding any features on that the others don't have. But of course, they'll all be motivated to add their own features, to distinguish themselves from their competition.
And once a API consumer is using a feature that other API producers don't support, then the consumer is locked into that producer, and the whole shared vocabulary is for naught. And of course the API consumers will be looking for additional features, because those translate into features that they can offer to their customers.
Basically, this requires API producers to work together to hobble their ability to meet their customers' needs, all to make it easier for their customers to drop them for a competing endpoint. So it looks like a net negative for everybody.
"""
To still allow for competition, you define a base feature set and representation, and then you allow vendor extensions. You need some sort of standards body that can promote vendor extensions to standardized, supported things. And clients can choose to support whatever (or no) vendor extensions that they want to.
However, I agree with you that it's not very practical, but for different reasons: 1) competitors don't necessarily like to cooperate to that level and 2) it will slow down progress a lot, which is a decently good reason for #1. And 3), which I think is the big one:
Companies doing this stuff really don't want standards if they're the first-mover, because standards necessarily enable competition. If I'm an anti-competitive producer (or even just a producer that doesn't mind competition, but wants to maintain a head start long enough to secure a market position), I don't want to start off with a standard: I want to do my own thing, and get people to adopt it, and then I can lock them in, at least temporarily. If someone comes along later and clones my format, that's fine, but they have to do work to figure it out, and I still own the format, so I'm naturally ahead.
Right. The problem is in the first step. The moment a consumer likes a vendor extension and begins relying on it, they are locked in until the standards body gets around to standardizing it. So all this cooperation to pick a standard and maintain it, and consumers still end up locked in because they like certain extensions more than others. And software providers for consumers still have to write individualized support for all the providers to in order to manage all their extensions.
So all these cycles went to building a standard, and where's the actual win? We still have handlers customized to individual providers. We still have consumers choosing to rely on singular providers.
Yes, this model makes it so content creators actually have to create content or their customers will drop them for a better content creator. That sounds great for users.
I'm not sure why I should care that a few user-hostile rent-seeking entities won't have complete control of the internet anymore.
The API extensions causing vendor lock-in complaint is fairly bogus. Features would be driven by the content renderers, not the content creators. It's that very abdication of power that browsers have given to content creators that the system I'm proposing would avoid.
One must simply route their VPN traffic through Eritrea => Thailand => Russia => Cyprus => China => back to some AWS server in SF & rejoice.
Just make it more expensive to trace you than the value of what you took/broke/F'd-with! Lawyers' fees not necessary!
Gotta push back against the "create more standardized doc types" bit (wat) -- it sounds like you want more APIs and more user-friendly tools for consuming them, which would be great and is more compatible with reality. SoA and recent shifts toward empowered-client approaches like GraphQL are steps in that direction.
I'm also glad you mentioned "documents" so often, because your ideas relate to a document-centric web. Which is not what we have. Rather it's evolved into an application delivery context.
That's exactly what I'm saying. JavaScript isn't the only part of the problem: HTML and CSS are also components of the problem.
Your distinction between applications and documents is an insightful one. Perhaps one way to describe the problem is that HTML and CSS contain elements of "application" rather than "document". If we think of a document as being purely semantic and layout/style as being elements of an application's rendering, then it becomes clear that only a fraction of HTML is actually document-relevant. CSS and the rest of HTML is application.
Few alternatives already exist (like gopher, the protocol).
I found a new interesting one recently (ala markdown but tab-based and parseable with regexps):
There is also a new browser that is being developped (not related to ContNet):
Unfortunately, among the crucial functions nowadays are the silly cosmetics, the parallax scrolling, the animated backgrounds, that allow marketers to pretend to have a website when all they have is formating for zero content. We failed to provide them with this fluff.
Yet almost 10 years later, they are still playing catchup with native apps.
Hard to believe in 2017, but as recently as five years ago Google (of all people) published the Caja compiler [1] for sandboxed/statically verified JavaScript subsets, and there was AdSafe aiming for safe JavaScript as well.
the only sane solution on ads is SafeFrames [1]. Which does not do much, but at least it prevents ads from scrapping the page and stealing your cookies from the main domain you are visiting. That is already a win, considering the mess it is now without it.
Your computer belongs to you. I'm ready to escape the cycle of 'oh they own everything because they snuck human rights violations into their software and hardware and nobody stopped them'.
The Web is used for so many things these days. It is a publishing platform that allows anyone to host their own content to the entire internet, thanks to Web Browsers just loading it. I can see IPFS being an improvement over the Web but besides the web server being a single point of failure, why is a DRM standard specifically going to destroy the Web?
Wordpress is used to power 20% of new sites. My own company is developing an open source platform for communities to run their own social networks (https://qbix.com) so what is this "eating" you speak of?
EDIT: This has been one of my most downvoted comments ever. Can someone explain the rationale? (Is it super obvious that the Web will be killed by DRM that asking the question should be punished?)
Sure, Javascript uglifiers and frameworks mucking with HTML standards and the DOM had already made "view source" nigh-worthless, and there were DRM'd plugins of course, and browsers had supported some schemes for a while as a de facto standard, but this still feels like a last-straw kind of situation to me.
> My own company is developing an open source platform for communities to run their own social networks (https://qbix.com) so what is this "eating" you speak of?
Sure, it's already the world's premiere delivery mechanism for "apps", advertisements, and mass surveillance software. I know. That's exactly the kind of thing that I don't mind living somewhere, but I'd like it not to be all mixed up in my networked hypertext document reader.
This Web's over. Anyone hosting an After-Web? I could do with a little more Webbing.
[EDIT] Though actually your thing seems fine. I saw "social network" and glossed over the rest. Sorry.
http://help.opera.com/operaconfig/versions/Win32/11.50/en/in...
[0]: https://gngr.info
If it takes only well formed x/html/5 it's not that big a deal.
Ideally a lot of "hooks" so that the more determined can make it do their thing. Not the thing that somebody else wants to force on them.
I wonder who's game?
Why not just do this yourself? Fork chromium and start commenting stuff you don't want out. It would likely only take a weekend or two of hacking...
If you really want a separate internet without the "bad parts", you can still use Gopher. There are still sites around, and you won't even get images, which were the first thing to "ruin" the internet, and were the launching point down the slippery slope to DRM video.
On a side note, it's interesting that so many HN readers are against this kind of DRM, but at the same time there's a large group here who are against ad-blockers. Ad-revenue is the main driver motivating companies to shoe-horn this crap into the web. It's not a coincidence that the biggest ad company in the world also makes one of the most popular web browsers and is a huge media distributor.
Really, I just need to find the time to do it.
I suspect I agree with you on DRM but this style of debate, where there is no attempt to argue or explain the issue, and the first line of argument is personal attacks or denigrating anyone with an opposing viewpoint, is depressing. Consider that accusing climate scientists of corruption has also been fairly effective.
For this particular issue, Netflix etc already requires DRM to play in a browser, and the browsers already provide DRM for Netflix etc to use. I would like to understand what the consequences of this decision are, if some of the way this works is standardized. Will this lead to more DRM? Is the only conceivable explanation that the MPAA is slipping the W3C members some bribes?
With so much money involved here, it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers.
And:
"It is clear that the W3C allowing DRM technologies to be developed at the W3C is just a naked ploy for the W3C to get more (paying) member companies to join"[0]
Really, the decision being made is between EME and Adobe Flash. Flash was the one cross-platform way to serve DRMed content before EME. And now that EME is ratified, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla can all work together to get rid of Flash, and all the 0-days it has been responsible for, and improve security and battery life for everyone on the Internet. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all...
Of course, we should also work to get rid of DRM -- it gets in the way of legitimate uses, and annoys legitimate users far more than it annoys pirates. But rather than vilifying Google and W3C and expecting them to be our saviors, instead we should be talking to Hollywood and Authors to adopt a DRM-free model just as many top musicians already have.
Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, and this is my personal opinion, not that of my employer.
W3C abandoning consensus (58.4%!) and open standards are biggest change in the organizations history. Its not just about DRM.
They would find another more hacky, less secure and less user-friendly solution, and everyone would be worse for it.
Lets be honest here. The argument being presented is that Netflix might create a new form of DRM without EME. We might get something worse then flash. There might even be a bad argument that Netflix and the content creator will abandon the market and millions in revenue if they can't get DRM.
A bunch of things that could happen, but not things that have happened. Flash have decline in used and Netflix was created in time before EME. To claim that EME was a requisite for those events is a logical impossibility.
Flash is a mix of dying and dead, mostly the latter. Having to use Flash is a strong economic and practical motivation not to use DRM, and if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be so much pressure to implement something in the browser itself.
Regardless of which of these occurs, you can bet that they wouldn't bother to sandbox the implementations, and we'd end up with the same security issues we had with Flash.
If browser vendors don't want to play ball (NPAPI is dying/dead, PPAPI and NativeClient are Chrome-only, etc.), then forget about in-browser video: they'd just build native apps instead. And maybe that's not a bad outcome for people who want the web to remain pure, but as a practical matter and a person who runs Linux, I like being able to run Netflix on my laptop.
I'm completely flabbergasted that people seem to believe that DRM would somehow magically disappear if the W3C hadn't been willing to discuss EME.
That sounds less like a technical problem and more like a threat to me. Because neither of those are actually technically necessary, except to support a business model that depends on some form of DRM.
Well, yes, that's absolutely true. But they have the leverage here (at least for now), whether we like it or not.
so why should _I_ have to install the un-auditable attack vector on _my_ machine?
you are well-positioned to understand this issue, so I'm baffled about how you can conclude this should be part of the default software suite in a browser.
Yes it is.
Suppose that in order to play DRMed content, the user was required to be staked to the ground and covered in angry fire ants. Nobody would be willing to do that, so people who use DRM would have no customers, so everyone would stop using DRM.
EME is in the opposite direction from this, so it will cause more DRM and less DRM-free content.
Adobe Flash has been slowly dying for years, which is not a problem.
In reality, all that will happen is that users will continue to be forced into using native applications where DRM can be enforced arbitrarily by whatever service they are trying to use.
That's the entire point.
All in all, average customers (as in, not the majority of the HN crowd) seem perfectly happy with the current experience. Even if they had to install a native app to watch Netflix on their laptop, I doubt that would change their perception much.
That seems to be the false dichotomy. The claim is that EME is justified in order to get rid of the oh-so-evil Adobe Flash. But if using native apps is a satisfactory alternative that can also replace Flash then why do we need to corrupt the web?
They (the general public AND 3DM, to TorrentFreak, bunch of whiners IMO) said Denuvo was the death of cracking and piracy. 3DM: No games crackable in 2 years time, said the headline.
now the cracking scene, which was mostly dying, has seen some revival.
It has adapted, but it's a slow moving ship.
Now a new generation (or the older generation, who knows, I'm just relaying my own observations)) are taking everything being thrown at them: encryption, virtualization, obfuscation, changing keys each patch, etc and making it look like light work to crack properly.
They make short, short work of it for the amount of complexity involved. So I hope they continue to throw new things at them with Denuvo, to keep them interested.
One group cracks the base game, sometimes someone else grabs all the updates and rolls them into a cracked patch, etc.
It's nice to see some life return to something that was basically dead, made automated.
Do you have a citation for this? Every game, dvd, stream, book etc ever has been cracked. Software protection has a 0% success rate.
In January 2016, 3DM reportedly nearly gave up attempting to crack Just Cause 3, which is protected with Denuvo, due to the difficulties associated with the process.[8] They also warned that due to the current trends in encryption technology, in two years' time, the cracking of video games may become impossible.[8][9]
[8] Owen S. Good (9 January 2016). "Piracy group nearly gives up on cracking Just Cause 3, warns of bleak future". http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/9/10741274/just-cause-3-crack-.... Retrieved 17 January 2016.
[9] Robert Purchese (8 January 2016). "Finally, tide turns in war with PC game crackers". http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-08-denuvo-game-cra.... Retrieved 18 January 2016.
So, no evidence, only a feeling of evidence.
I personally would much rather have a secure, optimized and clean implementation, rather than hacky plugins and poorly developed solutions that put me at risk and destroy performance.
Media companies couldn't give any less fucks about the web. They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with.
This whole process of enabling DRM is web developer's efforts to kiss media-companies ass in order for them to publish their products on the web. Artists and other creatives have the option to publish their works wherever they see fit. It's their creation, not the public's. In fact, there are actual art galleries that won't sell you their works if they don't deem you sufficient enough. How you exhibit their work matters to them. That's their right.
The web needs these media companies more than the media companies need the web.
Anyone that complains about DRM is doing it wrong. You are limiting the web because you are saying you don't want media companies to publish on the web. You are now causing the web to compete against media companies private apps or physical media, which is a losing proposition.
No one gives a shit about freedom. Everyone wants to use rights-managed content online. And the ONLY way to do that is with DRM.
So, yah, I'm not seeing any corruption here. Just acknowledgement of the fact that artists own their works, and web developers need to kiss their ass if they want artists to publish on the web.
When you hear about the multi-billion dollar fines and the immense amount of resources spent chasing down and punishing pirates, I have a hard time following this argument. I'd argue that the content owners and media companies need to get on board with providing the most seamless, easy to use, and accessible product for consuming their wares or this
> other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with
won't continue to exist.
Right, and that's exactly what EME is. Because DRM-free content is a show-stopper for them right now, but they recognize that DRM is a pain point for customers.
Why should content owners post their products for free consumption? What is the incentive for them to do that? How much money do you think they will make?
In case you haven't noticed, the web is losing to apps at every level, from things like Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat to shopping apps. Even newsreaders are being turned into apps. My parents only use the Apple newsreader, for example.
Do normal people even use the web anymore? It seems the web is only used by tech developers.
Such a sad loss for the web..
What's the point of the web if it's just another crappy proprietary platform? EME is basically Flash 2.0.
>Such a sad loss for the web..
What loss? Is the only purpose of a software platform to devour everything without any integrity and it's worthless if it fails to adhere to the will of multibillion dollar companies?
That's a gross exaggeration; it's nothing of the sort.
Flash is a generic application framework that gets more or less unfettered access to the network, local machine, and browser state (Chrome's Pepper Flash improved a lot of this, fortunately). EME is a heavily-sandboxed decryption and display engine, and nothing more.
The Microsoft DRM implementation is built into Windows (and made available to Websites via EME) and requires cooperating device drivers or no highres video for you.
"Cooperating device drivers" isn't really the right way to look at it. The drivers themselves don't have any code that will refuse to play high-res video. The EME is just able to use the trust chain to validate that the output path hasn't been tampered with.
Any application can make use of TrustZone and the trusted output path; it's not something special only EME can access.
Right, which is why you might want to use it for handling key material or other sensitive things. Except you now have some gigantic DRM blob (the Widevine trustlet is huge compared to most saner ones) running in your "trusted" environment, able to access your actual sensitive data. That privilege should not be given out like candy (and generally isn't, except when DRM is involved).
> "Cooperating device drivers" isn't really the right way to look at it.
At least video vendors used to claim that DRM-related obligations prevent them from publishing specs for and/or open-sourcing those parts of their driver code that deal with video decoding/output.
> Any application can make use of TrustZone and the trusted output path; it's not something special only EME can access.
So, I've just finished writing my trustlet. How do I get it to load on common consumer devices? The ones I have all seem to require that I get it signed by the vendor which doesn't reply to my mails. How should I proceed?
This is pure bluster. As if they'd just walk away from one of the highest reach distribution platforms and all the money that comes with it just because they were denied a gaping vulnerability surface that provides no benefit for either them or the consumer. Sure, instead of learning the lesson from Spotify they'll just leave pirating as the #1 accessible and convenient method of getting content.
The media companies are coming to the web, DRM or no DRM, but of course it costs them nothing to bluff and claim they will take their ball and go unless they get all the special treatment they want.
No they can't. Physical media is going under. Newspapers and magazines are folding, music is primarily distributed digitally, even TV stations are treating the web as their primary means of content distribution. Media companies have no other revenue paths that will matter over a decade, much less a century, and most no longer have the money, resources or capabilities to do anything else.
>The web needs these media companies more than the media companies need the web.
The web is nothing but a network of networks. It wouldn't even blink if every big media company went bankrupt and took all of their content with them. The web would be a lot less interesting and a lot less fun, and make a lot less money, but it would still exist, and people would just keep distributing and pirating what they have.
Media companies, meanwhile, have bet their entire future on the web, and are only now realizing that it isn't the gravy train they thought it was.
> Just acknowledgement of the fact that artists own their works, and web developers need to kiss their ass if they want artists to publish on the web.
Whether or not artists own their works is orthogonal to the fact that digital content distribution has rendered their works nearly valueless, and opened a nearly infinite competitive market for similar work.
Rights are irrelevant. Morality is irrelevant. What the artists want or feel entitled to is irrelevant. The cultural significance of the corpus is irrelevant. Effective DRM is technically impossible and if that's what artists are depending on to survive in the digital age, then they will lose.
They can die like the dinosaurs, or adapt to the new order and become birds. But they cannot, ever, ever unstrike the meteor that is the web.
I'm not thrilled with DRM in the browser, but at least it's heavily sandboxed, and is way preferable to a series of native apps that get full access to my desktop.
What percentage of consumers exclusively consume media through apps, though?
Why? The web seemed to be doing perfectly well without them. Maybe the profit margins of concerns like Youtube and Netflix need them.
I accept your logic but disagree with your premise. Online media is the future, and any media company knows this.
Linux users could be a bit more screwed if publishers had to move to Windows/Mac apps if interested in desktop/laptop users, but otherwise it wouldn't be a big impact for the big properties.
What's the difference to a user of opening a Netflix app vs going there in the browser? Basically nothing.
Do we want apps on the web, or in the OS—that's the only question here. Browser vendors are incentivized to provide a path for apps in browser, because otherwise they become less relevant. And so this is the result.
(Personally I'd rather have OS-level native apps anyway. So please, kill DRM in the browser. Browsers are massive resource hogs. Netflix devs would probably be happy too to not have to deal with cross-browser-compatibility shit. The web is a mess already.)
There is not any kind of real difference between not having a native app (or whatever WINE patches are needed to run it) and not having some platform-specific EME black box binary.
> What's the difference to a user of opening a Netflix app vs going there in the browser? Basically nothing.
For Netflix? Basically nothing. For the other 99.9% of websites that aren't as big as Netflix? Users balk at installing apps from little known sources, so those websites then won't have DRM.
How many sites will be using this outside of stuff like Netflix/Amazon/PS Vue/Sling and co? Buying someone's DRM solution or building your own only makes sense for high-dollar content?
But again, from my perspective as someone who wants to write code for anything but browsers, anything that moves dev jobs away from the web is good news for me.
It's already supported both ways. Chrome on Linux can play Netflix, and before that there were third party packages that would install the Netflix app for Windows along with all of the patches necessary to make it run on Linux.
It should obviously also be possible to run the Netflix app for Android on Linux, as demonstrated by the fact that all the phones are doing it.
It doesn't really matter how hard it is to make it work, because for a high value target like Netflix, someone will make it work. And none of that will actually satisfy the free software people regardless, because it's a binary blob either way.
> How many sites will be using this outside of stuff like Netflix/Amazon/PS Vue/Sling and co? Buying someone's DRM solution or building your own only makes sense for high-dollar content?
How many sites used to use Flash?
You have to expect that somebody is going to produce a low dollar cost DRM system (which is correspondingly even more buggy and ineffective) and market it to managers who don't know any better.
That's kinda my point. Browser vendors had a no-win which-is-the-lesser evil choice: accept an in-browser binary blob but keep the linkability, etc, of the web, or concede the rest of the already-vastly-shrunken ground of the premium video playback market to off-web blobs.
Thing is, in ten years, it's not going to matter, because long-form premium video on web will be such a vanishingly small niche.
> How many sites used to use Flash?
For DRM instead of for ease of development and portability? Not many, I'd wager.
> Thing is, in ten years, it's not going to matter, because long-form premium video on web will be such a vanishingly small niche.
But that is the point. Why permanently infect the web and destroy trust in our institutions for the sake of something that it would barely hurt anything to just let go?
My claim is that the alternative isn't "more open" the alternative is "more closed, because the open web has yet another (this time self-inflicted) nail driven through it."
But I do think they're both lost causes, long-term. The open web will likely be increasingly relegated, for most users, to a dangerous place of viruses, malware, and shitty ads compared to their happy little walled gardens.
Not to play more-paranoid-than-you, but if you want to save the web, I think you've got to fix the web, first. DRM is a sideshow.
The "tech-savvy internet community" is the only place the W3C has any relevance. Nobody else has even heard of it. And destroying trust in something important among the only people who actually know what it is, that's a problem.
> and browser vendors are also looking at the millions more people who would see Netflix et al ceasing to function on the internet as just another reason to ignore the web as a whole?
The web isn't the internet and Netflix isn't the web -- it is an app, just like Windows Media Player is an app. The fact that you can also write that app in javascript doesn't change that.
Netflix doesn't work like the web. You can't create a hyperlink to a specific title on Netflix and send it to your friends or post it on Twitter. You can't embed a Netflix video in your own webpage. Just rendering an app in a browser isn't what makes it the web.
> My claim is that the alternative isn't "more open" the alternative is "more closed, because the open web has yet another (this time self-inflicted) nail driven through it."
You can't get more openness by making the open thing more closed. Even if more things then use it, then they're using the closed thing and you've gained nothing -- or lost something because previously-open things on the open web become more closed.
> The open web will likely be increasingly relegated, for most users, to a dangerous place of viruses, malware, and shitty ads compared to their happy little walled gardens.
The web is already a sandbox. Browsers are specifically designed to run potentially malicious code, and are very good at it -- the large majority of vulnerabilities (and super-spammy ads) come from terrible plugins like Flash, or soon the EME black boxes. It seems rather odd to argue that having those things makes the web better.
"Walled garden" means excluding native apps that haven't been sanctioned by the gatekeeper. It's a terrible system that gives too much control to the gatekeepers, but it only makes the web more competitive by comparison because you can still put whatever you want on your own webpage and not have to get it approved by anyone.
Do they? With the rise of the Mac App Store and whatever similar MS is doing, I doubt they much care.
If it was easy to install mobile apps direct from the author's website as on a desktop, who would voluntarily be paying app stores 30% of their revenue?
The developers (unfortunately) don't matter in this scenario. If the users want to install apps from the app store, that's what they'll do. Developers who don't list their app in the app store will increasingly find fewer downloads because their app isn't as discoverable as other, similar apps. I'd be surprised if this isn't already happening.
For your average user, only installing apps through an Apple-vetted install location is actually really great for security, especially considering the sandboxing that goes on. It just sucks that the developer loses out.
They discovered that the whole "You will come to us. We are the rulers of content" attitude was delusional.
Now they are falling over themselves to get back to the top, while kids watch idiots play video games on twitch.
And even my 60+ year old parents just stream torrents because no one can provide a better experience no matter how much you are willing to pay.
Ultimately, as long as the big content companies have content that people want to consume, they will have leverage. They want DRM, they will get DRM, or else they will take their content elsewhere, to alternative platforms that people will then flock to, making the web less relevant.
EME is the wrong hill to die on.
Media companies tried to ignore the web because it is the antithesis of their business model. The result was that the media companies became less relevant, because the web is better than cable TV, better than movie theaters, better than physical discs. We could and should have ignored EME and forced media companies to adapt or die, just like all those other outdated industries.
Media companies are not special cupcakes, they are just businesses and like any other business they have to contend with disruptive new technologies. Nobody shed a tear when the film processing industry faded away; nobody suggested that digital cameras should be restricted for Kodak's benefit. Why are we acting like Hollywood deserves such special treatment?
Forgive me not really giving a hoot.
> Media companies couldn't give any less fucks about the web. They can go 100 years without > publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with.
Thus explaining their interest in the web, up to and including their push to lock it all down to prop up their outdated business model. If they are happy to stick with other sources of revenue they should do so.
> The web needs these media companies more than the media companies need the web.
Is that so? Funny how the web was already popular before media companies tried to get in on the action.
> You are limiting the web because you are saying you don't want media companies to publish on the web.
That's a strawman. Nobody is saying media companies should not publish on the web. We are saying that the thing that made the web valuable in the first place is openness, to which DRM is antithetical. Media companies are welcome to use the open system that is the web if they want to, and like the rest of us they will have to put up with certain trade-offs -- or at least that was the situation prior to EME.
> Everyone wants to use rights-managed content online.
I seriously doubt that the majority of web users -- billions of people -- care about rights management. The evidence seems to suggest that the overwhelming majority of users could not care less about copyrights, let alone the expansive "rights" that DRM is enforcing. People seem to ignore those "rights" at their convenience; in fact, people seem to seek the entertainment they want without regard to any "rights."
In fact, your beloved media companies also seem to not care terribly much about rights. The rights that copyright confers do not apply solely to copyright owners; included in copyright is the notion of the public domain and of fair use. Those rights are routinely ignored by media companies, through their lawsuits, their takedown notices (dancing baby), and their DRM systems which never include provisions for copyrights expiring and works entering the public domain. So other than yourself I am not sure ANYONE wants "rights-management."
Moreover, people have learned to love an entirely new kind of video entertainment: homemade, amateur videos of cats and other pets; of random people expressing their views; of dashcams in Russia; of idiots doing stupid things; etc. etc. In other words, while media companies were working hard to break the openness of the web, people were embracing that openness to create new forms of entertainment that the media companies could never have created on their own. Oh, yeah, it turns out the websites where those sort of videos are shared are the most popular video streaming services in the world and that more people (in the world generally) are watching videos on those sites than there are people watching cable TV.
So much for the all-important media companies.
> Just acknowledgement of the fact that artists own their works
We have evidence of artists dating back hundreds of thousands of years. Copyright and the notion that ideas and artistic expression can be owned only dates back to the 18th century and was just the final stage of European society adapting to a new communication technology (printing presses). We now have a new communication technology (computer networks) and society is adapting to the new rules and realities of that technology. Some ideas about art and artists rights are going to die, but in their place we will have new ideas and new rights. It is already happening, although in all likelihood none of us will be alive to see what society ultimately settles on.
So basically, the "fact" you are acknowledging barely rises to the level of a footnote in the history of artistic expression, one that is already fading into history as the Internet eats the remaining legacy communication systems. Sorry if that is a hard pill to swallow.
LOL. With what? Their paper? Their DVDs? Their CDs? Their cable channel subscribers?
Most of them already have pretty nice mobile apps; writing a decent native desktop app or three wouldn't stretch their capabilities at all.
if they want DRM, let them convince their own customers; just leave it off my machine.
On the other side, I can point to many websites that removed Flash/Silverlight/other security nightmare plugins after implementing EME.
The argument that some companies will avoid things their customers hate seems illogical, but you'll believe me if I provide an anecdote?
> On the other side, I can point to many websites that removed Flash/Silverlight/other security nightmare plugins after implementing EME.
Which is irrelevant because it has had a long known solution: Only install terrible plugins in a virtual machine, or if you're paranoid on a separate physical machine (a used PC capable of playing HD video is <$50), and only use that machine for that purpose.
And yes, that is an inconvenience, which is a feature, because DRM should be as inconvenient as possible. So that fewer people will use it.
> Which is irrelevant because it has had a long known solution
Your "solution" is not a solution for 99.99% of web users, and it isn't a solution for the remaining .01% who have to deal with botnets created from the other 99.99%.
The less customers like something, the less willing a company will be to sign a contract obligating them to do it.
> Your "solution" is not a solution for 99.99% of web users
One device used only for watching media is called a television and something like 99.99% of Americans actually have one already.
the cost should be born by the company who wants it, not the public.
why is this a bad thing for anybody but a content producer? and if it's not anybody else, then... why do we care? we have already legislated away the right to copy something in return for promoting creation. but the creation is going to happen one way or the other, so we need to go much further than the EFF advocates: we need to scale back copyright drastically.
it would have virtually zero cost to the public, and would not meaningfully affect creative output.
They have a lot of pull among a huge number of sites that depend on ad revenue.
Start buying this argument.
If I can compile it out, or get a version that someone I trust has compiled with it removed, that only leaves the rest of the web as a botnet attack surface.
That's what changes. Or doesn't improve, depending on how one views the timeline.
You can. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/05/12/mozil...
> that only leaves the rest of the web as a botnet attack surface.
1. Every new feature added to the web platform increases the attack surface of the browser, so this concern is not unique to EME. In this case, it removed a reason somebody would otherwise install Flash, which has a significantly larger attack surface.
2. All the major web browsers implemented EME before it became a standard, so the standardization of EME does not change anything here.
Your average web user has no idea what those words mean, and all they care about is being able to consume content unimpeded. They can't tell how it's implemented. Your decentralized web is not user friendly, and it will not gain mainstream adoption until it is.
If they are not corrupted they certainly acted in an extremely suspicious way.
I advise you to watch the whole video because it gets better and better, the press conference part in particular.
I'm pretty much done with trying to fight the american capitalist ideology which empowers these companies to steamroll over the average consumer happy to give up their own rights and freedoms then left to complain with the extortionist environments that leads to.
I don't think the world can continue on the way it's going without some serious ideological fragmentations in the near future, and the moment some country embraces its "Pirate Party" or creates an "Internet Bill of Rights" establishing the core tenets the EFF and others fight for as the basis of their internet-related litigation - is the moment I know where the sane people all probably went (or would go as time goes on).
Media delivery in 2017 is hardly an extortionary environment. Practically speaking, Americans spend very little of their income on the Audible/Netflix/HBO Gos of the world. Netflix costs $120 a year? Against a median household income of $55,000, that is next to nothing.
If anything, it's the opposite: there's a glut of content available to consume, in nearly every possible genre, at very low price points. There is far, far more good television than any person could reasonably watch, all for a couple thousandths of the typical person's annual wages.
I suppose so, but I wasn't really talking about entities that might be able to control a distribution channel. I was talking about average consumers.
Realistically, the limiting factor in (legally) distributing movies is not the technology, but getting the rights-holders to sell you those rights. This DRM tech does not really change the landscape on that, because a small new entrant already had no shot at making a deal.
Let's just "fork" the web from W3C (or 3WC as some people like to call them by now) instead.
If members are disgruntled, you can fork. That's happened before when there was disagreement about what to do with HTML, and it led to the creation of the WHATWG.
By and large, members this time are supportive. Not all, mind you, but all the large players.
(For those who don't know, Widevine, the DRM scheme that is currently best known as compatible with EME, and which taints my Firefox browser so I can watch movies, is owned by Google.) http://www.widevine.com
(Sidebar to the sidebar: Widevine has the least Googley website you've ever seen. Stock photos of a physical padlock, HTML code entirely based on table tags for layout. It's so strange.)
As advocates,I'm sad to see them do this. I will still donate to them, but it's unfortunate to see them quit. This means they will no longer have a seat at the table for future discussions.
They still do enough good to be worth donating to, but this was not a very good choice on their part.
"We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM."
Rather: "the browser where you cannot see DRM-infected video" - which is an active protection of the user against malware.
You should look at how Mozilla implemented EME then. The CDM is sandboxed, in a much stricter sandbox than the rest of the browser even. So no, the CDM potentially being dangerous (for privacy or security) isn't actually that much of an issue.
Of course, someone might at some point claim that the privacy features harm the copyrights protection, at which point choices will have to be made.
History provide ample evidence that Mozilla will make the choice their users ask for (which is, by the way, not necessarily the choice some users will voice the most loudly).
To be clear: if DRM is not implemented in browsers, Netflix and the like will just make native apps, which are far larger vectors of malware attack than the locked down EME standard is.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but "people should just not watch DRMed video" is not an actual answer to the problem at hand.
This battle is lost, let's not lose the war to have our little Alamo moment.
It's the same logic that leads to them to support JavaScript.
Replace "play poker with his buddies" with "watch movies his buddies are talking about" and "Joe's Terrible Malware-Infested Poker Site" with "Netflix's DRM-Infested Site" and the results are the same every time. Your grandpa isn't likely to care if Netflix has DRM or not so long as it doesn't stop him watching movies. If Netflix, because it's the brand he and his buddies trust, tells him to install a thing to keep watching movies, he installs the thing.
Maybe, maybe you might be able to convince your grandpa to stop watching videos using that thing he installed because it's bad for his computer's health... but there are a lot of "grandpas" out there, it's a huge category of people that "I just want to do the thing and I don't care how so long as it works and is convenient".
I don't think this a question of timeframe, it's a question of do the right thing for the most users. There are a lot more "grandpas" than there are DRM-fighting or at least DRM-wary concerned citizens like you or me.
This is clearly written from the perspective of somebody who never did help desk work or helped family or friends with computer problems.
You can't solve this problem at the standard level or the browser level. You can only solve by education users enough that they see no DRM as a feature and at the legal level by enshrining user protections in law.
False dichotomy. Instead of exposing a small percentage of users to large attack vector (native app), you are exposing a very large percentage of users (close to 100%) with a lower attach vector. THe potential for damage is much, much higher, since it would affect about everyone using the Internet with major browsers.
Maybe go even further outside the box, use gngr: https://gngr.info/
This was rather the point of Fall of Men ("Zeitpunkt des Sündenfalls") in Firefox' history to me. It was also the point in time where I stopped donating to them.
Make the zero-tolerance for DRM a unique selling point of Firefox.
In summary, if you already have Firefox, you don't need to go download a separate build to opt out of DRM. You can just uncheck the "Play DRM-controlled content" checkbox in the prefs to get to the same configuration.
You just have to reframe it to something like: "protects you against websites that try to plant DRM-malware on your computer".
If anybody was forcing them, it were the media companies.
EDIT: Yes, and Apple, I completely forgot about iTunes.
I don't see them dropping it even if the HTML standard Firefox follows drops them, unless other browser vendors drop EME too.
And those working for Google attempting to divert attention to Hollywood are symptomatic of the reality distortion field and self deception of SV. Google is a spyware company engaged in mass surveillance and creepily following everyone on the planet for profit. There are no redeeming values here. SV is basically a gold rush with greed and money being the primary driver glossed over with dollops of pretension.
The world just has to step up to take control and diminish the ideology that drives SV. So far be it open source, web services, standards or regulations there is no contribution. Why are there no alternatives to Firefox, Google, Facebook and others? You can't be completely dependent on these companies and then claim victimhood.
If you're interested, I wrote up some notes/thoughts from my experience in one of the sessions about EME and whether to implement it:
They have consistently thrown in the towel while diluting the very things that users would choose them over Chrome for.
There are many ways to exert influence in this world. Mozilla is in SV and is very much part of the culture and ecosystem. We need genuine alternatives and activism against entrenched interests.
No.
This was basically wanted by Firefox, Apple, Microsoft and Google. They are the modern web. Trying to go against them is how we ended up with XHTML, a standard no-one really wanted, or implemented.
Not accurate. EME was created and driven by Google, Microsoft and Netflix, as you can see here:
https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/
Firefox opposed it very strongly, and only gave in and implemented it when it was clear that all other browsers were behind it - at that point the battle was already lost.
When the EFF says
> The W3C process has been abused by companies that made their fortunes by upsetting the established order, and now, thanks to EME, they’ll be able to ensure no one ever subjects them to the same innovative pressures.
It is safe to assume the companies the EFF refers to are Google and Microsoft.
This was absolutely NOT wanted by Firefox.
They were the only browser to represent the users in this fight.
Don't put Mozilla in the same group as those other traitors.
They were folding, too.
"Firefox downloads and enables the Google Widevine CDM on demand, with user permission, to give users a smooth experience on sites that require DRM. The CDM runs in a separate container called a sandbox and you will be notified when a CDM is in use. You can also disable a CDM and opt out of future updates by following the steps below. Once you disable a CDM, however, sites using this type of DRM may not operate properly."
They rather lost a unique selling point. Not implementing EME/DRM is a form of protection of the user against malware.
A well-hidden build of Firefox to silence the people who accuse the Mozilla Foundation of betraying their principles...
This really matters because so many of those exploits relied on other features to actually run the payload. Not having any of those in the first place is a big attack surface reduction, even if the politics are legitimately debatable.
But they ended up including DRM in their browser. So they're traitors and hypocrites, right?
And who was WHATWG? Oh right, exactly the same companies that now voted for DRM as W3C standard. And why could they do WHATWG? Because they are the vendors of the majority browsers.
Ian Hickson also came out strongly against DRM when this whole debate started: https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2
Look at the history of their standards, and the direction that the web has actually gone.
The power for where the web goes is in the hands of web developers and browser developers. The W3C documents some things, but they are not a major player.
"L'etat, c'est moi" - until a new state comes to power.
The web is its users.
The history of wide scale, maintainable, free speech just hasn't worked. Ever. Why should computers be any different?
Oh, you mean I can't get Netflix on the forked internet? Welp, back to mainline.
Netflix is on the other side? Cancel 'em.
1. Cancelling Netflix saves money.
and ...
2. Watching less TV gives you more free time to get outside, exercise etc.
Anyways, Netflix, Google, Apple, and Microsoft (probably - they aren't making their votes public) support this, so this is a great time to cancel your subscriptions and stop using their products.
And that (the web as it is) is exactly what I want. And I want that the media companies who cannot accept that the web is free of DRM to stay away from it.
You can complain, of course. What you can't do is control others. That's something the web is good at working around.
They try to spread DRM-malware over the EME interface onto the user's computers.
You can complain, if you want. That doesn't appear to be helping but you're free to do so.
My strategy is to avoid it where reasonably possible. I let other people do what they want with their stuff.
"Alternative web: Some competition without DRM, zero-rating, or other nonneutrality bullshit"
You go ahead and stick with your Netflix, buddy, and best of luck to ya.
American ISPs and legal precedent are all of course bought up by the interests building the former, but luckily I'm not tied down here.
That said, most of actual market transactions involve some sort of subtle coercion or manipulation of emotions, which means they violate the core assumptions of economics. {Marketing, sales, religion/cults, magicians, A/B testing} all involve some sort of cognitive / psychological manipulation -- the core incentives of the modern economy incentivize companies to optimize for attention capture and behavior exploitation.
Those same people are the ones who turn around and complain "what can we do" and organize social media armchair protests when consequences simple enough for them to understand come along.
Not the best allies.
but if we were to ban DRM from the market would something else crop up to replace it? would content creators stop making content?
what about IP laws? if we got rid of them, there would probably be more content AND more DRM? or would it be more content and less DRM since it would only be a matter of time before someone legally reproduces your work so why bother with DRM?
(Complex issue but I'm not sure I see your point)
That's a hell of an accusation. And you should present evidence if you're going to level it. It is dishonorable to make baseless attacks on people's character and integrity.
Whatever the answer is, I don't think it's stopping DRM with brute force. I think it will need to involve either coming up with alternate business models that are anywhere near as viable, or a way to keep it in a box to use for the few applications that really benefit from it.
I still can not believe the number of people that do not understand what EME is
EME enabled Properiertary Plugins, it gives control over the web to MS, Google, and Adobe. Full Stop.
They will control everything.
Widevine, Adobe CDM, and MS PlayReady. Those are your proprietary EME plugins that everyone must use now
Welcome to the non-open Web
Thanks Tim berners-lee, good job
EME is the standardized version of the needed functionality from those obsolete plugins.
EME is about control and limiting freedom, not about replacing Flash
TV/Movie producers have a legitimate reason to want to protect their media. The lower the bar is for viewing the content they spend lots of money and work producing for free the more people do it. If there were no barriers to viewing movies then there are zero ways in our current economy to get a positive return. You can't fund Wonder Woman on money from advertisements. There needs to be a system where people pay for content.
EME is a means to an end. It's not inherently evil. If someone takes it and uses it for an evil purpose then we might have something to discuss, but today there is no way for our modern media to exist in a fully open source world. If EME didn't exist then we would still be using plugins to view Netflix. There is no situation where Netflix can operate in a fully open source system. And that's not a bad thing.
I disagree.
>>>The lower the bar is for viewing the content they spend lots of money and work producing for free the more people do it. If there were no barriers to viewing movies then there are zero ways in our current economy to get a positive return
umm they are the ones creating the Barriers, DRM is a Barrier. I can not tell you how many times I have wanted to buy a movie or some other content only to find out it is not on the Platform or service I have choose to use.
Instead they want to only use the Platforms or services they bless. This is where the monopoly power of copyright breaks down.
If I want to watch a movie using my rPi running kodi I should have an easy way to buy a movie that just plays via a standard codec, it should not only be on a netflix, or worse now that every studio is making their own streaming platform we are going to see more piracy because they are simply refusing to sell their content in the manner consumer wants to buy it.
Basicly if you do not use Windows/Mac/Andirod/iOS you are out of consuming media. Linux haha screw you
>>EME is a means to an end. It's not inherently evil
DRM is inherently evil..
>>but today there is no way for our modern media to exist in a fully open source world.
That is completely false there is thousand and thousands of hours of media that exist in a fully open source world.
Music is almost all DRM free today, there is a strong push for DRM Free books,
TV and Movies seem to be the last hold outs for Defective by Design DRM.
What is supposed to be happen is a zero-tolerance and active fightback against anything DRM-related in the web - be it in the browser or be it a plugin.
I'm wondering why this proposal gets so much more attention than all the past DRM that's been on the web. Did people just not realize that it was there?
This is a different animal: Adding standardized interfaces to browsers specifically designed to talk to dedicated DRM modules.
There were people that complained about Netflix using Silverlight, and such (in my case, it meant I couldn't watch it on my PC, for example). People complained about Flash back in its heyday too.
EME isn't causing a general outcry though, outside of certain corners of the tech world.
I have never installed any plugin for DRM and don't know anybody who has.* I also warned people about the dangers of DRM all the time. In this sense the pushback was always there - but since browser plugins were hated anyway this was a rather easy fight.
* OK, to be 100% honest: I am aware that Flash allowed some kind of DRM - but I never seen or used any application which used it and I don't know anybody who used any application where Flash DRM was used. So the statement still holds.
I highly doubt nobody you know has installed them. It's much more likely they simply don't tell you they did or it never came up in conversation.
> I highly doubt nobody you know has installed them
Netflix (let alone Hulu) is not as popular in Germany as it is in the USA.
Their interest is in letting people use their browsers to view content. The media companies have made it clear that’s not happening without DRM.
So the browser companies support it.
It’s not manditory, you can ship content without it. But if Chrome said ‘DRM free only’ all that would happen is people would abandon it to be able to watch video online.
If you don’t like DRM then get legislation made. But you’ll never do that because even without the giant lobbying budgets I don’t see why lawmakers would make it illegal.
If people were actively boycotting anything that uses DRM and were bawling out media companies that use DRM, there would soon appear media companies that provide a "no-DRM media package". As soon as these companies were making big money with DRM-free content, I am pretty sure the large media companies would in the long run give up their stupid idea that DRM is necessary.
DRM is only necessary because there exist (too many) people who don't have a zero-tolerance policy against DRM.
Really? I can see a pretty good argument for why it SHOULD be legal. If I want to post some content I make online why shouldn’t I be able to try to protect it?
And let’s not go through the ‘But Sony rootkit!’ stuff. You can make safe DRM. Rooting someone’s computer is already a crime, that’s why Sony in trouble.
> As soon as these companies were making big money with DRM-free content...
Far too many people see nothing wrong with piracy. It works on music because it’s so cheap. I don’t think you’ll get 99c TV shows or especially movies any time soon. It probably isn’t sustainable, especially for movies.
So people will pirate, out of cheapness or inability to pay or ‘righteousness’ or whatever.
It’s not going to happen.
> ... I am pretty sure the large media companies would in the long run give up their stupid idea that DRM is necessary.
Why should they, from a business perspective, give up control they have now with basically no downside? I don’t even see a moral argument they should give it up.
Now I agree we need better fair use laws, and security people should be able to poke at DRM to make sure it’s not doing evil things. But I don’t see why society, under moral or business obligations, could support outlawing DRM.
The current state of affairs is that it's not just legal to use DRM, it's illegal (DMCA) to try and break a DRM scheme, _even if you do so in order to exercise your legally guaranteed fair use rights_.
It seems to me that there should be some sort of sort of moral right to self-defense that applies here: just like society/the law recognises that it is morally acceptable to use deadly force to defend yourself from someone who is trying to murder you (even if it wouldn't be otherwise), we can recognise that it is morally acceptable to use the legal equivalent of deadly force (ban DRM, make it illegal for them to enforce their right to protect their content) in self-defense (against them using DRM to make it illegal for you to enforce your right to fair use).
More bluntly: Content creators, with their support of the DMCA, have proven that they have no concern for my rights or freedoms. What standing do they have to expect me to have any for theirs?
The comparison to deadly force.... seems hyperbolic. No one is in mortal peril. I would have voted you up without that. Those kind of statements make it impossible to have/take discussions like this seriously.
On the other point, I'm not convinced that supporting better fair use laws is enough on its own. An equitable compromise between two parties with fundamentally opposing interests can rarely be reached if there is a deep asymmetry in terms of their ability to just take what they want and run. Maybe, if comparison to anything involving murder is going too far for you, we can instead make one to (ironically enough) stealing: if the local group of school bullies keeps dragging you into dark alleyways and taking your lunch money, will you also support better rights to keep your lunch money but think it is going too far to demand that they be put in detention, because you see a pretty good argument why they should have a right to free movement?
The MPAA is not actively attacking you. They’re putting conditions on how you can view their content.
Letting the police do the attacking stuff is just a formality.
The only difference is that the videotapes can now try and enforce it themselves.
Their content will still be distributed without their consent, because DRM is broken as quickly as it is implemented.
And they will not be the one using DRM to control distribution of their content, the DRM vendor will be.
Next: why shouldn't I use the magic beans the mafia are offering me to protect my content?
You don’t seriously expect people to engage in a discussion like this do you?
As emodendroket pointed out the rest of your comment is the argument against any kind of lock ever. It’s a false dichotomy.
Why computer should not serve its owner best interest and instead serve interests of media companies?
Well, a broad-based pressure group making them think they'd lose office if they didn't support such a thing is the only way anything like that ever gets passed. A lot of folks in Congress didn't want to see JASTA passed but felt they had no choice but to vote for it, so there's a model.
But yeah, this conversation, talking about how maybe if we ask Google nicely they'll act against their financial interests, strikes me as pretty naive.
I mean legally I don’t know if this counts as a free speech argument or not I just don’t see how such a long would end up passing muster.
He's the Director of W3C as far as I know.
Internet should be like ZeroNet: a serverless system where content of interest is shared by its millions of viewers and where servers only use a small amount of bandwidth as backups and initial seeders.
That the wikipedia still needs servers and asks donations yearly to keep them online is a testament to how stalled progress in internet infrastructure is today.
The interests of users are no longer front and center. The past several years of the Web platform's evolution have been characterized by privacy invasions, out of control Javascript, spammy push notifications, AMP... and now this.
This is not what many of us signed up for. I don't know if there even are alternatives to the Web at this time but when you can't trust even the standards bodies to act in your best interest, it's time to start talking about how we could walk away from the whole thing.
Netflix is a 'user' of the internet, as any other.
The web is open - those who want to share their content freely can do that - those who want to DRM, they can do that.
The 'march of economics' is usually just the 'march of reality'. Game of Thrones is expensive to make - ultimately, people have to get paid for it somehow.
Most creative/entertainment projects are a dud. Only a few even make money.
The next day HN is lamenting about a standard encryption API being defined.
The "free ride" Internet is over.
We're losing the internet day by day, if we haven't done so already.
I've seen people and posts here and there calling for attention on these issues, but imho it's all too subtle. We should start using harsher terminology for what's actually happening. This is flat out CORRUPTION, and I'm not seeing anyone express it as such.
It's probably too late already, and unfortunately, this is merely a reflection on what's happening in the world in the larger geo-political context. Corruption everywhere.