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Comment by cremp | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth would a company that actually makes a difference join a glorified media company that has DRM rules written by the exact companies that would benefit?

Honestly asking, why is Wikimedia joining W3C a good thing? If anything, I think, it forces Wikimedia's hand to cave when the DRM pressure hits again.

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> Why on earth would a company that actually makes a difference join a glorified media company that has DRM rules written by the exact companies that would benefit?

You've omitted that the latter organisation is also extremely influential. Which is presumably why Wikimedia deemed it worth joining.

> why is Wikimedia joining W3C a good thing?

Because Wikimedia's influence will probably be good for the open web.

Isn't that kind of a moot point now that WASM would allow for effective DRM? Also, wasn't DRM proposed 6+ years ago? Meanwhile, WHATWG is run by Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla. Would you feel the same if Wikimedia decided to join WHATWG instead of W3C?

> WASM would allow for effective DRM?

This doesn't make sense to me - obfuscated code that is handed over to people to decompile isn't "effective" DRM. "Effective" DRM uses things like physically tamper-resistant chips and remote attestation (Chrome OS has a pretty nice implementation of this with TPMs, IIRC). And it's not like obfuscated code on the web is new with wasm; obfuscated JavaScript has been around forever.

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