You don't need to embrace DRM in order to stop using Adobe flash. The multiple browser currently in use for the last few years that don't have adobe flash installed is a rather strong proof of that. you would have an argument if EME came first and then flash had started to decline, but that is a false history. Flash started decline many years ago, and EME was forced onto the standard as an reaction to that.

W3C abandoning consensus (58.4%!) and open standards are biggest change in the organizations history. Its not just about DRM.

Netflix has never existed without DRM. Flash, Winevine or whatever other technology they use, they've always had something. Without it, they would never be allowed to exist by the people who own the content. It's naive to believe they would just stop using DRM magically.

They would find another more hacky, less secure and less user-friendly solution, and everyone would be worse for it.

The chain of events is not that EME has enabled Netflix to exist. Netflix and flash came first, and EME came afterward.

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.

> the decision being made is between EME and Adobe Flash

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.

That's pretty unlikely. If Flash (and Silverlight) died and browsers didn't have anything built-in, the studios/distributors would just get together and form a company to build a new plugin that does the job. Or worse, we'd have several competing implementations.

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.

You're looking at this as black and white, when reality doesn't work that way. It being infeasible to completely remove DRM from everything doesn't mean there isn't value in discouraging its use. And that's exactly what economic and practical incentives would do if including DRM meant they lost users.

So, the argument is ... either cede control of your browser to us in a form where it is illegal to examine what we do with it OR we will continue to use a piece of crappy technology that exposes you to security problems.

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.

> 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.

but the converse is also true: if they don't implement EME, then you are welcome to install any third-party attack surface on your PC that you wish.

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.

> A lot of people think that the battle here is EME versus DRM-free content, but that's not the case.

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.

That's just wishful thinking, I fear.

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.

And then DRMed content will be properly separated off into its miserable DRM slum that everyone hates, the cost of using it will be higher, users will complain more, companies who don't use DRM will capture more of the market, etc.

That's the entire point.

What "miserable slum", though? Honestly, I find Netflix's Android app an absolute delight to use. Even if I'm sitting on my couch with my laptop, I'll pick up my phone to cast something to the TV before I use my laptop for that purpose.

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.

Then what purpose does EME serve?

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?

Because "corrupting the web" is still going to be a better experience for consumers, and cheaper/easier to implement for producers. If EME didn't make it in, they'd build their own native apps, but they don't want to have to do that if they can help it.