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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

So this is how the open web dies.

Can we fork the W3C into a non-corporate puppet now?

We should simply start doing new standards through other organizations. There's no fundamental reason to float new standards through W3C rather than some other organization.

I'm completely confused why the W3C is relevant at all. This already did happen, the browsers created the WHATWG. Since the browser vendors' opinions are the only ones that matter, why do we care what W3C thinks?

Maybe W3C is trying to stay relevant?

I disagree that browser vendors are the only ones to matter. The web is used for many things, like legal documents between private parties, by the government(s), for education, personal notes, literature/cultural heritage, the entire way we consume and perceive written information in this age. Do you want to leave all that to an ad company? Because that's what you're effectively doing when you give WHATWG this role.

You are of course right that browser developers/vendors get to decide what they're implementing. But web authors, OTOH, can decide which format their works are published in. Browser vendors and WHATWG have shown no interest in simplifying the web. Rather, they're piling up monstrosities of unnecessary complexity, with the effect that, willingly or not, it is becoming infeasible to develop a new browser from scratch.

Most of all, WHATWG seem uncapable to come up with any privacy protection mechanism; instead, we're getting DRM. Honi soit qui mal y pense

sure, if you want to become the wwgnu foundation.

nobody cares about things they perceive as fringe ideological issues until it's too late.

they'll marginalize you by making fun of your personal habits while the open web dies.

only those of us who knew the web before it was closed will really know/care why it was special.

I think that W3C is what makes us believe we're sitting at the table when it comes to decide where the web is heading, when in reality we're not. So while I think W3C has good intentions and is acting in good faith (I'm somewhat undecided on DRM, please convince me of your opinion), I hope for a push to bring the lack of stewardship of the web to public attention, and another standards body (ISO/IEC, IETF, whatever), or W3C under a new statue to emerge and take the role of W3C-as-it-is.

(Re-posting this from the other thread [1] which didn't make it)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15277622

> convince me

In case you haven't read this excellent piece against DRM - https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree

DRM was coming to browsers with or without the W3C’s blessing. In fact, it was already there via plugins and wasn’t going away. This has changed nothing except where the implementation is documented.

The hysteria over this is just ridiculous.

Just because some horrible thing currently happens to exist doesn't mean you need to (explicitly or implicitly) endorse it.

We should make implementing DRM as expensive and inconvenient as possible.

Totally! We're going to have to start by making sure we never standardize it. </sarcasm>

Yes, absolutely. What's confusing about that? If the DRM benefactors have to keep developing shitty, expensive, unsupported plugins that need to use unofficial APIs and therefore be updated all the time, it's going to cost a lot more to use DRM.

Although I share your enthusiasm, I don't think closing the barn door after the horse left is going to help. Customers have to organize and demand an end to DRM by force of withholding money, clicks and eyeballs ...

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass

I'm not sure what your analogy is supposed to express, but this isn't some ideological stand; it's a simple matter of increasing maintenance costs for DRM software.

DRM doesn't and will never work. It only serves to annoy people that pay for the movie/game/whatever legitimately. It's against everything the W3C stands for.

You dont' have to support something just because it's happening. You fight it, you don't give into it.

I think you mean "against everything the W3C used to stand for" here.

Clearly they stand for DRM now.

> DRM doesn't and will never work. It only serves to annoy people that pay for the movie/game/whatever legitimately.

I never said otherwise, and in fact I totally agree. A big part of my annoyance at the outrage over EME is the automatic assumption that you must be pro-DRM if you're not joining the furor.

> It's against everything the W3C stands for.

No, that's you (and everyone on this thread) projecting. The W3C is, and has always been, an engineering interoperability organization developing a data interchange format. It's right in their mission statement: "The W3C mission is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web". Notice what isn't in that sentence. Everything about "freedom", "openness", etc. is other people projecting onto them.

Before EME, web DRM is documented in the various plugin architectures. After EME, web DRM is documented in the HTML5 spec. From an engineering perspective, the difference is practically nil. The emotional overreaction here is just because of a perceived betrayal that isn't even real.

> No, that's you (and everyone on this thread) projecting.

"The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability."

I don't know mate, that seems pretty clear to me.

> ensure the long-term growth of the Web

Without DRM the web will die? It seems to have been fine so far, would you not agree?

>will never work

As in it can't be secure? Well it's tied in with trusted computing, see this Widevine document:

https://storage.googleapis.com/wvdocs/Widevine_DRM_Architect...

If all of the decryption takes place in a "trusted zone" on "your" device, then it's pretty secure.

Those are known to be exploitable though...

"Pretty secure" needs to be qualified though. Yes: there are DRM implementations without known holes. There is, however, no DRM protected content I'm aware of anywhere that doesn't exist in a high quality unprotected form somewhere indexed by TPB or wherever.

I mean: yes, average users can't crack their Netflix app. Everyone can still grab Stranger Things via torrent as soon as it drops. So does that count as "working?"

DRM is, for the most part, digital Prohibition.

- Makes archiving unnecessarily difficult/impossible.

- Micromanages legitimate use, including limiting legal usages.

- Reduces or eliminates goodwill towards platforms, content distributors and content producers, e.g., it ain't cool.

- Reduces sales through introducing artificial barriers to social network effects, i.e., torrenting often increases sales and popularity through lower-barrier social network effects.

DRM-free fails if people don't pay for it, but this is rarely the case as the majority of people seek to be honest and support their favorite content producers to keep creating more.

However, if like the RIAA and MPAA going after every single dime like corporate justice warriors, people can and will crack the DRM and share content or simply look elsewhere.

> DRM doesn't and will never work.

It depends on what you mean by "work". See https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 (linked elsewhere in this thread).

Will it matter? Any organization created to manage web standards is going to be dependent on browser vendors. Google/Microsoft/Apple want DRM so we get DRM.

I would posit that RIAA/MPAA/etc want DRM, and won't consent to Google/Microsoft/Apple opening up access to content without it, so we get DRM.

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