I also find the title to be rather sensational.. "I tried creating a web browser" ^ "Google blocked me" implies that Google blocked them from creating a web browser.. which is not the case.
If an ISP fully embraced the Net Neutrality repeal and started blocking video content, and someone posted on HN that ISPs were "blocking them from building a streaming service", no one would be complaining that, "technically you can build it, you just can't reach any of your customers." Everyone on HN would understand that part of building a service is the having the ability to reach customers.
In the same way, part of building a web browser is having the ability to render web content. If Google can block your custom browser from rendering content, then for all practical purposes they are blocking your ability to build a browser.
Eh.. in a way, but not really. It can still work as a web browser but a web site can still render however they'd like based on your user agent.
If I made a site today, I could add the same functionality if I wanted to. Since I own the site, that's my choice.
I completely agree that Google should _not_ block their content based on your custom web browser. That is evil.
First, any browser can report any user agent they want. There are a number of examples of browsers faking or changing user agents to get around sites that try to differentiate based on those strings.
Second, while any individual web site can implement logic based on the user agent, that's the sole choice of the web operator. By restricting Widevine access, Google is blocking rendering of content on other people's domains.
The non-ISP, in-browser analogy I would use would be if Google decided that in order to render an AMP page in your new browser, you first needed to get their permission. They're not just blocking their own content, they're blocking an entire category of technology.
It's also worth mentioning that even under the user agent analogy, if this headline was, "Google uses user agents to block Firefox from accessing Youtube", pretty much every person on HN would call that anti-competitive behavior worthy of regulation.
To be fair, the 2013 ecosystem was a lot more Google friendly than the 2019 ecosystem is. I'm sure the average non-HN reader still wouldn't care today, but I would at least hope HN itself would have a different reaction.
This isn't good, but it's not arbitrary control. These companies chose to implement widevine, so they chose to allow Google to dictate who gets to legally use WV.
(Sure some "special purpose" browsers get away without, but they also only Target a very limited audience)
Break them up. They are no different from a competing government at this point.
Because those third party sites choose to utilise closed software from that company. And Netflix doesn't only utilise Widevine as a DRM, it uses several different DRM systems, so Google don't have control over anything.
We may all think (know) DRM is dumb, but DRM is more than just about how hard it is to hack. Sure, everyone could in theory reverse engineer this stuff. But the point is that it's only legally protected as long as it's at least not trivial. Open sourcing would probably invalidate their legal defences against people downloading Netflix movies.
I highly doubt that. A ToS violation is still a ToS violation (in the case of Netflix, which is expressly a streaming service), and copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. The legal protection that's afforded to DRM itself is something that's literally only useful to you as a content holder if you're looking to abuse copyright and go far beyond what copyright law actually grants you! That's what makes the whole notion so problematic in the first place.
Further, Google's own browser, Chrome, will not stream above 720p Netflix(and maybe Amazon now). So at most Google is a lesser DRM god.
The issue is more complex than that, and generally relates to some hardware APIs for securing the video path not being available to Win32 applications in Windows.
It at least used to stream 1080p for Amazon, and it may for CBS but I'm not 100%.
It honestly seems like a decision made by the streaming providers.
I completely agree that this is unacceptable... but I think the blame really rests on the content owners who forced this DRM in the first place. Every damn thing on Netflix is widely available on torrents in hours, so it's totally useless and just makes things worse for everyday consumers.
That's just a sensationalistic as the headline. There isn't a single company controlling and selling these modules. There is a several of them, in open competition. The OP chose Widevine because they are easiest, but with sufficient perseverance he could probably use any of them, or at least any that distribute x86 binaries. It's damned near impossible to prevent someone from running a binary if they really want to.
I also found the original article difficult to swallow. It gave very little detail - so little we have no idea what Widevine said no to. For example, was it "could you provide Widevine and loan me an engineer to help me integrate it with my browser - but I can't pay you because it's all open source". Or was it "I've got it all going, I'm willing to pay you commercial rates per licence - how can I buy licences?" It if is the former hats off to Widevine for replying at all.
As it is, we only get a small part of his side of the story, no insight at all into why Widevine reacted they way they did, and a headline that's guaranteed to get clicks.
Call me paranoid, but I get the feeling I'm being manipulated.
OP sounds like he feels entitled to others' work and efforts. If he wants to play videos in his browser, he can make them. Or find people who will make videos for free for him.
All OPs browser does is syncronse playback across users legitimate Netflix (or other) accounts.
OPs broswer will pass the encrypted video through to the DRM plug-in, which will authenticate from Netflix through to the to the screen. It will decrypt the video, decode it, re-encrypt with hdcp and send it to the monitor.
The DRM chain is intact. OPs browser can't be used to pirate the videos, or steal Netflix.
All he needs is permission to ship the closed source DRM plug-in.
Widevine is only one of several implementations of a Content Decryption Module; it just so happens to be by far the easiest to license (though that doesn't mean that's easy!).
But EME includes a fully freely implementable Clearkey spec. Ultimately sites generally don't want to generate keys for it, but it can be done.
Noope. Netflix has explicitly stated, at W3C, that they absolutely won't use any open EME implementation.
In practice any open CDM that you implement yourself will be totally useless. The "open" parts of EME have no real utility, and exist only to be able derail criticism by making rhetorical arguments about hypothetical open implementation, even though it's by definition exactly the opposite what Netflix and Google designed EME for.
2. To create market barriers for anyone who wants to compete with existing streaming services like Netflix, Spotify, and Youtube Premium
3. To create market barriers for anyone who wants to compete with Chrome, Safari and Firefox
4. To replace old proprietary plug-ins from Adobe and Microsoft with new proprietary plug-ins from Google et al.
To be fair, you can make a similar argument about what's the point of a standard for the video element: in reality, you need to support H.264 encoded video, so just supporting Ogg/Theora/Vorbis (as some early implementations did) doesn't suffice, so what's the point of that standard? (Also the img element, the object element, etc.)
But yes, EME is different because it fails to fulfil its use-cases in a fully free implementation (one can imagine, potentially in the future, a free software implementation that passes encrypted content to a hardware module that implements the decoding, but that seems like little gain and unlikely to happen).