> The result has been API enclosure; appropriation of commodity capabilities that themselves are standards-based — e.g., USB, Bluetooth, NFC, file storage, etc. — by a proprietary ecosystem and denial of even the safest and most privacy-preserving versions of those features by open, interoperable, and standards-based application platforms.

WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebNFC are not standards. They are Blink-only non-standard APIs.

Google employees wrote these specifications and proposed that they become standards. In order to become standards, they need more than one independent implementation. So in practice, this means that they ask their counterparts at Mozilla and Apple for feedback and approval.

Both Mozilla and Apple rejected WebUSB, WebBluetooth, and WebNFC on privacy and security grounds.

This is what Mozilla has to say about WebUSB:

> we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them

This is what Mozilla has to say about WebBluetooth:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

This is what Mozilla has to say about WebNFC:

> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

This is not Apple’s doing. The reason these things are not standards is because Google have been unable to convince anybody outside of Google to implement them, even when they pay Mozilla half a billion dollars a year.

Perhaps you think that Mozilla and Apple are too sensitive about potential privacy and security issues relating to new protocols proposed by the world’s biggest ad company. Did you know that after Google wrote a spec. for WebMIDI and shipped it in Chrome, porn companies started using it to fingerprint and track people?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063

> Apple alone must be on the hook to implement any and every web platform feature shipped by any and every other engine.

This is basically the author saying “Hey, you know those specifications we proposed that nobody wanted to implement but us? Let’s force Apple to implement them! Now we’ve got two independent implementations and they can be standards now!”

Why on earth would he do this?

> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner Product Architect on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. […] From 2008-2021, I was a software engineer at Google working on Chrome, Blink, and the web platform.

— https://infrequently.org/about-me/

> The sham of WebKit as an Open Source project

Chrome was created as a fork of that “sham” open-source project.