And intentions of those who push for deploying DRM aren't even secret: http://boingboing.net/2013/05/26/us-entertainment-industry-t...
So, are you suddenly supposed to trust them blindly when they insult you by not trusting you?
Netflix runs custom clients to make sure I'm authenticated and authorized before streaming video to me and streams it in a format that only their software can decode. Sometimes these clients are built into my TV and other times they are written in Silverlight and are built into my browser, but that doesn't automatically mean they're a rootkit any more than Lotus Notes is a rootkit. The only reason it seems otherwise is that you have this weird manichean worldview where any DRM is morally equivalent to the Sony rootkit.
DRM is unethical not because it's always a rootkit. But because it's overreaching. The fact that it's prone to be malware just demonstrates the potential for abuse of overreaching preemptive policing.