What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?
1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects
2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects.
3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning.
Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.
As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:
https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm
It says:
To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.
So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).
Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.
As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".
It seems like it would be trivial for Widevine to revoke access if there were ever abuse.
I have more details in a blog post I wrote last month. https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
If you had a private, proprietary fork of your browser that was being distributed and nobody else could modify it or contribute code that would undo the DRM, and you were willing to sign giant contracts spelling out in exacting detail what features you could and could not add around video (e.g. no download feature), and the Widevine people thought you'd actually have the financial resources to defend your private fork against hooking, memory overwrite and other attacks (you don't think proprietary Chrome is just Chromium+library, right?) in a long term manner, then they might have been willing to work with you. But then you'd be a company, not an individual open source developer.
Rights enforcement and open source are not compatible.
What if you aren't actually the good guy?
The jump to the null hypothesis that you've stated is made too soon without doing this first.
I don't think this is how they do anything anymore. They are not "the good ones" and they will probably do anything that fits into their business model or ideas without any hesitations.