The W3C's Soul at Stake

And, akin to mandated security backdoors, once a feature is introduced, it tends to be used not just as planned or anticipated but in every fashion someone can conceive.

For many concerned about the Web and the Internet, the malicious abuser in this case becomes private entities using such DRM channels to balkanize and privatize the Internet on a wholesale level.

[Aside: In writing the previous sentence, I experienced an interesting typo: "wholescale". I didn't immediately notice it, in part because it at a term makes a certain amount of sense, itself.]

Let's return to the video stream paradigm. Anecdotally, my streaming Netflix experience has, rather than becoming better with time and presumed advancement, instead become increasingly crap as content providers have declined to renew contracts in favor of their own separate distribution channels. As the consumer, I'm looking at 3,4, 5, and more separate accounts (each at at least circa $10/month, and sometimes significantly more) now in order to stream the same content.

I fear that with "ubiquitous DRM", combined with other changes happening in surveillance, legal prosecution, et al., we may be looking at the privatization of the public communication that has, to this point, made the Web and the Internet what they are.

TL;DR: I fear that integrated DRM gives entrenched parties too large of a stick to use in insisting: My way, or not at all.