If they had held fast, we could have forced the companies to do their key management in something like WebAssembly and avoided this gatekeeping mess.
We have DRM, we hate it but it's there, and it serves a purpose. If it is your intellectual property, you get to decide how it is used. And if you don't want to make copying too easy because you think that it will get you more money, that's your right.
The goal of the W3C is not to make to make a political statement about the rightness or wrongness of DRM. They are here to create standards that respond to use cases. And unfortunately, copyrighted content diffusion is one use case, and content owners want DRM.
And if you read the standard they came up with, it is not that bad. They managed to isolate the "evil DRM" part well enough without completely destroying its effectiveness. They also didn't require any proprietary component, though services can require them (that's what happened in the article).
Using WebAssembly (which is essentially optimized JS) for DRM is a terrible idea IMHO. DRM, to be effective, usually requires access to protected system components. It means that to make an effective enough DRM to be accepted by content providers (which is the entire point of the standard), we would need to give WebAssembly way to much power.
>And if you don't want to make copying too easy because you think that it will get you more money, that's your right.
They seem to think that but is there any truth to it? I do pirate some series/movies from time to time (mostly out of convenience) and you can get high quality rips of pretty much anything mere hours after it's available on streaming sites anyway.
So what is this DRM supposed to achieve? Prevent the average non-technical user from saving the stream? I mean I'm sure they wouldn't even know where to start, there's no "Save As" button on Netflix for instance. Simple client-side limitations would do the trick for 99.9% of the population. On the other hand the few technically-savvy stream rippers seem to have no issue bypassing these protections.
DRM works better for interactive content like games because it's not just about ripping the output.
How many decades do we have to suffer through this broken scheme and this technical debt until the right owners realize that they're wasting their time and their resources to push a system that only serves to make it harder for legit clients to consume their contents?
When iTunes got rid of DRM on music files I thought it would be the tipping point where right owners would realize that this scheme was ineffective and counter-productive, but apparently it's still an industry standard for some reason. Have legit users on unsupported systems stream low-res video while the pirates can watch it in 4k for free. Ridiculous.
I think DRM in general was never really designed to completely thwart piracy.
The goal is actually to delay the pirated version as much as possible and to raise the barrier to entry when pirated versions are eventually released into the wild.
Oh I dunno... have you tried asking one of Netflix's 140M subscribers? Or the 26M people who use Amazon prime video?
The point of DRM isn't to make it impossible to pirate things -- it's to make it difficult enough to get pirated content that most people would prefer to pay a few bucks a month to watch things via a channel where rights holders are compensated. And by that measure, it seems to be working pretty well.
When it comes to music, I can most of the time listen to it legally via Spotify or Google Play Music/YouTube Music. When it comes to movies (and especially for older movies), the rights holders give me no choice but to pirate because they simply don't make it available for me to obtain in a legal way.
As an extreme example: I was looking up an old childhood movie "Hugo: Djungeldjuret". The rights holder have stopped distributing the movie and they no longer sell it, but they do issue copyright claims and take-down requests towards anyone who hosts it. How am I supposed to watch a movie like that in a legal way when the only distributor has stopped distributing it?
Furthermore I assume that most of that latency is not due to the time required for pirates to break the DRM but rather the time for the original riper to encode the file and share it through the pirate food chain until it reaches the public trackers that I use. You'd still have to wait a little while to get your pirate file if you don't have a subscription to the official streaming service.
I think you underestimate how many people prefer to watch the latest episode as it airs.
> not due to the time required for pirates to break the DRM
Even if the DRM is already broken, you can't just ignore the initial time spent to break it.
> until it reaches the public trackers that I use
Let's say you stopped 100 random people on a busy street and asked them what a "public torrent tracker" is. How many do you think would know what that even means? And of those who do, how many do you think would actually be able to download a movie through a public tracker?
This is why Popcorn Time was such a huge hit: it provided effortless access to movie torrents for the masses. Obviously, this also explains the rapid response by content publishers to crush the project.
I don't, but even without any DRM you still have the delay between the moment the ripper manages to get the file and the moment it's available for download. DRM doesn't really change anything here. It's not like for games where DRM can delay the release of cracked version by days or even sometimes weeks.
>Even if the DRM is already broken, you can't just ignore the initial time spent to break it.
For movies and TV shows I think I can. It's just so full of holes and broken implementations that it's usually trivial to crack. I have yet to see the release of a good quality movie or TV show because they couldn't crack the DRM.
>Let's say you stopped 100 random people on a busy street and asked them what a "public torrent tracker" is. How many do you think would know what that even means?
I honestly don't know, but I do know that streaming solutions and direct download websites are pretty mainstream in my experience. Megaupload was huge for instance.
But even if you're right and it's obscure, doesn't that make DRM even more pointless? If people don't pirate because they don't know how why would they start ripping Netflix streams? Technically speaking it's even more involved.
You're missing the streaming option. But alas, watermarking + ContentID + DRM have essentially conquered that realm. Acestream and IPTV are two surviving options, but the barrier to entry is not low for these.
> For movies and TV shows I think I can. It's just so full of holes and broken implementations that it's usually trivial to crack.
I don't know enough about current media DRM solutions to comment here. What I do know is that will likely change once TEEs/enclaves become more widespread on consumer devices.
> If people don't pirate because they don't know how why would they start ripping Netflix streams?
"Right-click > Download" versus, at the very least:
1. Finding a reliable torrent tracker
2. Downloading and installing a torrent client (viruses galore!)
3. Finding a torrent with enough seeders
4. Figuring out which version of the movie/show to download (what's a "nuke"? what's up with the quality (cam)? why is this movie split into 37 .rar files? where are the subtitles? why is the audio out of sync? etc. etc.)
You and I have already gone through all of this the hard way, but it's important to realize that it's not intuitive at all.
It's a good point, but I believe DRM isn't just about piracy. It's also about control. I read a good article about this once, but I can't find it anywhere right now so I'll summarize what I remember.
As long as DRM exists, if you want to make a Blu-ray player you have to go and ask the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator for their blessing, so that you can decrypt and play (for example) AACS-protected media. It doesn't really matter that AACS has been broken since early 2007 and that pirates can easily circumvent it - as long as you want to sell a player above-board and not risk potential lawsuits, you still have to go and license it.
(This might not be true for AACS in particular, but AFAIK it is generally true of more recent content protection systems.)
That's when the control part kicks in. Good luck getting that Blu-ray player approved for content decryption if it allows the user to skip commercials, or make small clips of movies and send them to your friends, or other such features. I do believe there would be some amount of demand for those features - well, mostly the first one. However, I don't see the AACS LA ever approving such features while having Disney and Warner Bros as founding members[0].
I'll try to find the original article I got those ideas from. I'll reply again if I ever find it.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120218192257/https://www.aacsl...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190119000840/https://plus.goog...
Where did you get the impression that this isn't what they actually want? The goal is control over users, not acquiring non-users (pirates).
Another poster here made an interesting point, that this wasn't true until the 90s. Deciding "how it is used" is different from (and broader than) deciding "who gets to distribute it".
This was always true. Most copyright traditions recognise Droit Moral, and the right for the author to determine the integrity and treatment of the work, and have for, in some cases, literally hundreds of years.
But of course they didn't say that, because most of them got some direct or indirect interest in DRM, enough so that the few remaining players did have no choice than to hop on board, too.
Having worked with various DRM teams I know that they have to treat their code as if its the most secret code in the world, if they don't the media companies can swoop in and ban them and then no Netflix for your users. This is why Widevine code isn't open source (other than the glue EME code) and is almost certainly the reason for the refusal to work with a small open-source form of Chromium. If for example the project was used to "steal" content the media companies would be mad at Widevine, with lasting repercussions for all Chrome users.
It's worth noting that typically all DRM teams work as if the hosting environment is an adversary. For example Widevine don't trust anything Chrome says as someone could recompile it and lie about the security. The only times this is relaxed is where the platform is deemed secure, such as CrOS or iOS.
And your house also belongs to them. According to your analogy.
The former is about the same effort as torrenting and about as obviously dishonest. The latter is mostly possible using Netflix as intended as long as I don't mind sharing my password with them.
The only thing it could even arguably be doing is preventing users from uploading videos to pirate sites, but that is empirically a massive failure given that all of the videos are already on the pirate sites.
So all you're doing is battling the honest people who have paid and then want to make a copy for format shifting or some other fair use. And the legitimate value of battling that is a negative number.
I wonder if more protocols like this will get invented and become mainstream. Or those glorious days are already behind us? Since every big corporation is just trying to grab market share by creating walled gardens for everything.
Let's say Google, Microsoft and Apple announce that they will be removing any DRM from their browsers on 2020-01-01. They will also remove any DRM playback app from their App Stores. So no Netflix on PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads or any Android device (including stuff like Android TV).
What do you think would happen?
Of course, content producers could run back to the state for more protection (as they always do) and get legislation forcing browser makers to comply. And around and around it goes.
Implementations of such forced-by-court features tend to be buggy. ;-) The implementation bugs might differ in subtle ways in each new browser release. ;-)
If they would only remove it from the browsers, they would start pushing their native applications like Netflix for Linux, Netflix for Windows, Netflix for Mac. And browsers would be free of their DRM which causes all this.
Users follow use cases and would not be averse to spending 30 seconds installing something in order to watch their favorite content.
There's also sort of a game theory situation with the removal of DRM, as it would be a competitive advantage being the only one that supports it.
People paying for Netflix are paying for convenience. That wouldn’t change in absence of DRM.
But back to the point, if Netflix wouldn’t use DRM, it would change absolutely nothing since copyright infringement is still illegal and those DRM protections are completely useless.
If the latter, torrenting is plenty cumbersome enough that if the studios are pushing movie-viewing to "Pay us money or you have to torrent it," they're winning.
Last I checked, the BitTorrent protocol didn't provide packet sorting that would allow for this behavior (by forcing the beginning of the movie's bytestream to be the first data downloaded), so my mistake if the protocol has improved and I was unaware it provided this service.
Yes, and this functionality has been built into many of the largest torrenting programs out-of-the-box for quite some time now. In the case of µTorrent, it was added in version 3.0 all the way back in 2010.
Obviously, how quickly the stream will buffer depends entirely on the state of the swarm. Popular items will work almost immediately, while particularly unpopular items won't be streamable at all.
Anecdotally, I have personally witnessed my (very nontechnical) friends streaming 4+ GB 1080p ...popular cat videos... that weren't available from Netflix. They did not struggle with the process in the slightest.
DRM is not illegitimate. It just sucks and operates in a way that is immune to free market competition - the reasons for that immunity are the true thing to fix. Users should have alternatives as there is a clear market there. If DRM is so bad, then that's what should kill it.
How is that different from the current state of EME plugins? Other than that proprietary browsers ship with the most popular plugins installed.
Then Apple and Google would get deluged with complaints from their customers and Jailbreaks would once again become popular.
A lot of smaller companies would die, and a lot of users would suffer - but none of the parties involved actually cares about the users; we're just a natural resource to be stripmined.
Even elderly people were using and watching pirated stuff installed by their kids as they just couldn’t bother.
No DRM support in major browsers would mean pirating becomes the #1 way to see anything again.
Then again, the way media companies are balkanizing the streaming space, this could become (again) a reality soon anyway.
Consumers will have to purchase or rent horrible and overpriced hardware supplied by broadcasters. Like they were doing for decades with satellites, and early IPTV.
Piracy will raise a lot. Many users don’t want to pay, or can’t pay for that custom hardware. I was using Netflix service for some time without major issues, but they don’t have anything in my country, too small one, they won’t be selling and supporting their set top boxes any time soon. Unlike accepting credit cards and broadcasting videos, physical retail doesn’t scale that easily.
More specifically, those associated with the MPAA and the RIAA.
We were sold DRM as "the evil legacy studios are evil and make us use DRM". Well, now that Netflix produces their own content and it's still DRM'd... I guess that isn't really the reasoning.
In the rare case of content that is actually made by Netflix, it’s easier to just put DRM on it, because otherwise every system dedicated to encoding and playback would have to have a code branch that was special for non-DRM content. It would be a maintenance nightmare. It’s a lot easier to push all content through the same pipelines.
DRM benefits Netflix just as much, if not even more than it does traditional media companies.
DRM does not benefit Netflix. It’s complicated and takes a lot of resources to run. They’d much rather not have to deal with it at all. Having DRM does not gain them any customers — in fact it loses them some. But it’s the only way they can get content.
(The closest I can get to an explanation is that the "exclusivity" deal might be limited to online streaming platforms only, and whoever is selling the content still worries about everything else. But streaming is a significant and growing portion of all media consumption (and could be even more so, were it not for that pesky DRM), so I'm extremely skeptical that this would be a real issue.)
This is where your narrative is strategically short-sighted. It would be a very significant leverage point for their own proprietary content over the traditional media companies' - the kind of thing that 'disruption' is built on!
You can't tell me with a straight face that somehow they don't have this power.
DRM absolutely benefits them because it ensures that only parties they permit are allowed to access content, for the same reason it benefits other media companies.
The fact that every pi8ece of Netflix content is on the pirate sites within hours of release would prove otherwise. Netflix is well aware of the uselessness of DRM.
And you're right, they probably did negotiate DRM free licenses. But you missed the other part of my post -- the cost for implementing a separate DRM free pipeline was very high, and there would be little ROI to the business. Not having DRM on just the Netflix content would get very few new customers, if any. How many people would say "man I would totally sign up for Netflix if only their own content was DRM free, even though I'd need a DRM enabled player to play everything else, and oh yeah this only applies to web streaming anyway."
Whether or not they have a 4k display... that is probably the blocker. I have a 4k display but it's not my primary display (instead opting for a 165Hz 1440p panel) and I never bothered to buy a 4k TV, given how dirt-cheap high-end 1080p TVs are. Would much rather have the black blacks of a $500 1080p OLED TV than a $3000 washed-out 4k LCD.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
Google/Microsoft/Apple/Adobe want to support
media content, but to do so requires towing
the line with the media companies
If it weren't for Google Play Movies and iTunes Movies they could have just told the MPAA companies to take a hike.
Rather, focus on concrete steps you yourself can take:
1. Make sure the hostile black box is not available / disabled in your browser. So when you end up at a page that wants to use DRM and it doesn't work, you simply attribute the problem to the website being broken (which it is), and move on. If you do need to keep using the DRM crutch for now, then only use it on a separate dedicated browser or device.
2. Base your media setup around a DRM-free pipeline (eg Kodi). Make torrenting content your default. If you want to pay indie creators for DRM free downloads, feel free. But don't fund any studios that generally push DRM.
3. Share downloaded content with friends (eg USB drives), encouraging them to not fund Netflix et al developing and promulgating more DRM. This is especially relevant for "exclusive" releases that are meant to push people into signing up for yet another subscription.
Does Netflix DRM even "work"? I've never personally seriously looked around for how to break it, but I note there are still plenty of people who seem to manage to review Netflix-based shows on YouTube with video clips of sufficient quality [1], and at least some of the reviewers in question I am fairly confident aren't getting any sort of privileged backdoor access or anything.
Is it "anyone can crack with a smidge of effort" or "it's really hard but it spreads once cracked"? I'm not asking for a lot of details of the crack per se, just general details of how successful it can be said to be in practice.
[1] I'm not claiming they aren't necessarily re-re-encoded by the time they get to me, but if they are, I can't tell for sure, so I'm going with "sufficient quality" as a description.
I have had the 1080p one for 5 years.
Actually they should be byte-for-byte copies, but generally aren't, since Netflix makes you jump through half a dozen hoops to get the highest quality streams, so pirated copies are actually much better quality than what you can get on Netflix.
The browser has to decrypt it somewhere along the line to play. Always was interested in tinkering around with it.
For a starting point I'd be going through chromium and checking out how they implement widevine.
For a while now there's been rumors in the torrent scene that a few people have broken it, but keep coy in case it gets patched. Then again it's trivial to screenrecord at the cost of time. Who knows?
Level 3 requires a secure path all the way to the display (so the decryption happens in a Trusted Execution Environment, the keys are stored in a Trusted Platform Module, and HDCP or similar to the display). Level 3 practically only exists on mobile currently, as Intel's SGX (their TEE) is typically disabled by default on what processors do support it.
And they did it for the worst reasons. Vanity and pride. The corporations pushing DRM are merely motivated by greed.
But the players in the OSS community that opened the door for DRM were TERRIFIED of being labeled as "obsolete" or losing pretend "market share". They refused to take a stand against DRM, if it meant losing any users. Just look at the discussion thread where Mozilla decided to support DRM.
The arguments in favor of DRM by the OSS community are always the same: - We need to support terrible DRM because it is popular (and being numerically popular is super important). - We need to compromise against our users because if we don't then we won't have any leverage (which we are conceding we don't have anyway) - "marketshare" - "integrated branding"(?)
None of this makes sense, because Google, Apple, and Microsoft have completely different goals with building for-profit forms.
People who speak in slimey business sales marketing speak are making decisions about the direction of OSS software. And these people are obsessed with cargo-culting the big commercial platforms.
My guess is that, if browser vendors wouldn’t have played ball, the DRM vendors would have worked with one of the JRE vendors to optimize the Java applet runtime, and contributed to performance improvements on the browser side for all the open browsers, such that “Java applet” would no longer be a scary heavy-weight thing nobody wants their browser to launch. That would be (one of) the implicit threats hanging over browser vendors: if you don’t cooperate, we’ll take your control over innovation on the web away by refocusing it on an improved Java experience.
And if the browser vendors really didn't like it for unknown reasons then they could have just stopped supporting Java in the browser, as has largely already happened for various other reasons.
This is one of those "we all must hang together or we shall all hang separately" situations, and they apparently decided they'd prefer to hang separately.
It's sub-optimal, but I don't think an optimal solution actually existed. A standards board divorced from reality is no better than no standard at all.
That's fine. It's better that the burden for maintaining non-standard plugins be put on the sites and browsers that choose to do that, rather than be placed on everyone else.
The argument that platforms have to do this for competitive reasons is doublethink. If the experience is worse and that will cause customers to flee, how is it that they would only flee from the platforms that don't have DRM but not the content providers that require it? Wouldn't that create a huge market opportunity for new DRM-free studios, who would then out-compete the traditional ones by being available on all platforms instead of only on Insecure Expensive Proprietary Slow Cableco Platform Nobody Likes?
The DRM module would still ship with Chrome and Edge (and likely Safari too, given Apple became involved pretty quickly), you'd still need multiple different streaming formats (in the form of different DRM formats) as you do today, and maybe you'd need slightly different JS codepath per-browser too (but that's not a big difference to today with the different DRM formats).
It's very unclear to me that the W3C refusing to be involved from day one would've led to any outcome very more than subtly different than the one we ended at. At the point that the specification went to Recommendation, there were already multiple interoperable implementations, so objecting at that point was purely a matter of principle, it literally wouldn't have affected the outcome in any way.
Moreover, such organizations are made up of their members, and it's up to the members to do the right thing as well. Nobody had to volunteer to be the first to add this gunk to their browser. It can't be a competitive disadvantage if nobody else has it either, and it can't be a competitive advantage if everybody else has it, and those are the two options so why not choose the first?
As much as some people like to say one is better than the other, I think the answer is always "it depends". Unfortunately, it depends not only on the relative power and momentum behind the current problem when deciding, but also on unknowns such as what will happen in the future.
It's hard for me to find too much fault in them deciding that they would rather stay somewhat relevant to the process than become obviously irrelevant (if that was indeed the thought process), as there's still a lot they can affect in the future. Armchair quarterbacking about what they should have done isn't too useful in my eyes.
The downside is as you say that the browsers can point to the standard as for why they implemented it, but that's why it's a trade off, and not cut and dry (IMO)
I mean, yes, but why would they do that?
> Wouldn't that create a huge market opportunity for new DRM-free studios, who would then out-compete the traditional ones by being available on all platforms instead of only on Insecure Expensive Proprietary Slow Cableco Platform Nobody Likes?
You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it.
Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy.
So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations.
> You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it.
Except that it is fungible, it's just not universally fungible.
The reason Winter Dragon isn't fungible with Game of Thrones is that you don't like it as much. You'd rather watch Game of Thrones. But there are thousands of shows, and out of those there are hundreds you might want to watch, yet there is only time to watch dozens or fewer.
Nobody can actually watch all of the shows they might want to watch. Letting "lack of DRM" be the thing that chooses between the ones of equal desirability to you is as good a way of pruning the list as any.
> Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy.
Who says it has to be someone without connections to the existing industry? New independent studios form all the time as existing talent strikes out on their own. All it takes is for one of them to prove the market before everybody is doing it.
What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS?
One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
Plugins like Flash, which are the historic answer for DRM on the web, have a huge surface space and can interact in the browser in all kinds of odd ways. These EME modules are much smaller, they are much less powerful (AFAIK they either return a frame to the browser to composite or directly to the OS compositor, so you don't need to worry about how they change layout and then change layout again as you reflow), and as a result of that can be put in stricter sandboxes. That's a clear win from a browser security and stability point-of-view, which is a concrete benefit for browser vendors in making it viable to drop Flash (and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash).
They still sandbox it because from the user's perspective it's still an unauditable black box, so at least the user can verify the sandbox. But that doesn't actually solve the problem, because the black box code is interacting with black box hardware. If there is a bug, you've done the opposite of sandboxing it -- you've prevented it from being traced and given it direct access to hardware.
> and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash
The solution to Flash should have been to have someone reverse engineer it and publish a 100% open source implementation, including the DRM. Then let them keep publishing using Flash format as long as they like, but no more black box.
These companies make Xbox, Chromecast/Stadia, Apple TV, etc. Things that could plausibly be a media center, given some latitude and open standards. You could upload your movie collection onto it, give it your streaming account credentials and it gives you a single interface to all your media.
DRM kills that. You can't make an interface that allows the user to watch a Disney movie they've paid for and then have it show the YouTube commentary on it. You can't have something that recommends Orange Is The New Black after you watch The Wire because one is Netflix and the other is HBO.
Because DRM allows the studios to assert rights that copyright doesn't give them. That's all it does -- that's why they want it. It clearly doesn't prevent piracy.
> One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
The problem with this is that it can't simultaneously have such low privileges that it can't do anything harmful even if totally compromised by malicious actors, while also having such high privileges that it's immune to interference by even the owner of the system with physical access to it. They're diametrically opposed objectives. And the second one systematically fails regardless, but having to pretend that that isn't the case compromises the ability to do the first.
If W3C chose not to help write the DRM standard, the browser vendors could easily create a new organization and write a standard anyway (as happened with WHATWG).
Browser vendors and website authors could then read that document just as easily as anything published on the W3C website, so there is no "burden" for them. There would be no difference to the end user. The only burden we're talking about is the inconvenience of setting up an organization to do the writing. It's a minor speedbump at best.
The upshot is that there is no way to prevent browser vendors from standardizing anything they want. It only gets blocked if they disagree.
The reason to keep it out of W3C is because it violates their core mission: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission#principles . Other organizations with a different mission are free to do as they wish, obviously.
The majority of the membership was in favour, definitely, but it wasn't unanimous. Some members I think it's predictable how they voted (MPAA may have voted in favour, EFF may have voted against); others less so.
Without W3C DRM they would have kept those plugins alive instead of deprecating them. I see no reason why they'd have migrated to webasm, webasm wouldn't provide the know-thy-customer aspect the DRM people want.
It really isn't. The W3C at the very least permits a solution whereby content companies liberally distribute binary blobs for every platform under the sun. Hell, it even permits an open source solution that e.g. speaks directly to the DRM hardware in graphics chips (don't know if that would be technically feasible, don't shoot me).
It doesn't have to be this way.
In this context it's really specifically Google being assholes about this. They can choose to not be assholes about this. The fact that the W3C allows them to be assholes about this doesn't change the fact that Google is choosing to be this way about it.