That was also the first thing on my mind. And I almost lost respect
for Sir Tim for giving tacit assent.
I would like to hear more from people connected with W3C over the
years as to why it ran into the long grass. Some commentators have
even described it as "irrelevant today". I'd like to think
that's wrong and W3C has an important future keeping a public
and accessible World Wide Web alive.
Among the many questions in my head:
What is the "Web" today, 30 years on?
What can the W3C realistically do to steward it?
Have principles of universality and accessibility been abandoned?
Can there be a WORLD WIDE Web in the age of state firewalls and the
"splinternet"?
Does the W3C have overlays and censorship resistance on its roadmap?
Does the W3C recognise the need for Small Internet technologies,
Gemini and suchlike as a reliable, accessible and simple information
delivery network?
Refusing to spec it would have just given us another two decades of Flash-equivalent hell. Developers want features, and you can either provide a road-map for making them cross-compatible and specified or you can refrain from doing so (at which point developers will do whatever, and then some private company will provide a closed-source solution, every browser will support it because it provides a service end-users want, and instead of any piece of the story being open the whole story will be closed and it'll be a quarter century before something standardized replaces it well enough to uproot the de-facto closed standard).
> Refusing to spec it would have just given us another two decades of Flash-equivalent hell.
That's pretty much what we got with EME, since the technology relies on proprietary plugins. The only difference is that EME got a pointless stamp of approval from the W3C as supposedly a part of the "open" Web, even though there's nothing open about DRM-encumbered media.
Right. I think more likely than not Chrome would have implemented their own extension and it would have become the de-facto standard. Maybe Apple would have resisted and we would have two solutions.
Would the web have survived as a "popular" destination without EME?
I imagine that the w3c saw that large corporations had most of the attention of most netizens. Those large content producers/distributers want DRM. Did the w3c fear that if they hadn't accepted EME, most of those netizens would move off the web and onto the native apps which the video streaming companies would, inevitably, have produced?
I say "inevitably" because most of them stream to native and web anyway these days, and in many cases the native apps are wrappers around HTML5 players. In a way, the w3c's acceptance of EME allowed its reach to extend to more devices, where if they hadn't taken EME on the web may have shrunk.
(I'm kinda just thinking out loud here. Sorry for the rambling)
Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.
Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support.
I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too.
At some point, there's a spiral, where:
- Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership
- Declining viewership leads to declining budget
- Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization
... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.
At risk of sounding optimistic, I think EME has really bolstered adoption of the open and DRM-free BitTorrent protocol for media streaming. I didn't do any actual head-to-head comparisons, but movies that come out on services like Paramount+ also tend to get a simultaneous release on BitTorrent trackers, albeit for some reason it usually isn't mentioned in the trailer. Despite the lack of advertising, though, it really seems to work: on some recent movies, stats I've seen on trackers show very impressive results for the BitTorrent box office. One movie I looked at had been seeded possibly millions of times in just a few days.
So I am really thankful for EME for helping to support open standards in that regard.
The EME spec is a useless junk. It describes a fictional architecture that no browser has implemented. It's not possible to use it for any actual DRM implementation — if it was, it wouldn't be DRM! The authors of the spec are on the record saying they would never use the implementation described in the spec.
The real specs that all the browsers and media vendors used for DRM are vendor-specific closely guarded secrets, as they have always been.
The only purpose the spec ever had was laundering DRM with W3C's reputation.
The W.3.C. is already powerless when it made that move; it would be even more powerless if it didn't.
That situation truly opened my eyes to the fact that for most people, pragmatic arguments of the kind of “We cannot stop drugs anyway, so we better legalize it, so we can better regulate it.” really seem to only apply when they already agree and that the same people who say it in one case suddenly are staunchly against such pragmaticism when it no longer fly their way.
d.r.m. would be there regardless of what the W.3.C. would do and at the time the lesser of two evils was certainly the W.3.C. having control over the specification to some degree.
I didn't know actually the E.F.F. had such a position, I felt it was the last agent in internet transparency and freedom that hadn't gone insane. It's a sad thing to read but I won't be donating to it any more if such is it's modus operandī.
nonrandomstring|3 years ago
I would like to hear more from people connected with W3C over the years as to why it ran into the long grass. Some commentators have even described it as "irrelevant today". I'd like to think that's wrong and W3C has an important future keeping a public and accessible World Wide Web alive.
Among the many questions in my head:
What is the "Web" today, 30 years on?
What can the W3C realistically do to steward it?
Have principles of universality and accessibility been abandoned?
Can there be a WORLD WIDE Web in the age of state firewalls and the "splinternet"?
Does the W3C have overlays and censorship resistance on its roadmap?
Does the W3C recognise the need for Small Internet technologies, Gemini and suchlike as a reliable, accessible and simple information delivery network?
shadowgovt|3 years ago
zozbot234|3 years ago
That's pretty much what we got with EME, since the technology relies on proprietary plugins. The only difference is that EME got a pointless stamp of approval from the W3C as supposedly a part of the "open" Web, even though there's nothing open about DRM-encumbered media.
klez|3 years ago
the_other|3 years ago
I imagine that the w3c saw that large corporations had most of the attention of most netizens. Those large content producers/distributers want DRM. Did the w3c fear that if they hadn't accepted EME, most of those netizens would move off the web and onto the native apps which the video streaming companies would, inevitably, have produced?
I say "inevitably" because most of them stream to native and web anyway these days, and in many cases the native apps are wrappers around HTML5 players. In a way, the w3c's acceptance of EME allowed its reach to extend to more devices, where if they hadn't taken EME on the web may have shrunk.
(I'm kinda just thinking out loud here. Sorry for the rambling)
blip54321|3 years ago
Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.
Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support.
I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too.
At some point, there's a spiral, where:
- Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership
- Declining viewership leads to declining budget
- Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization
... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.
jchw|3 years ago
So I am really thankful for EME for helping to support open standards in that regard.
pornel|3 years ago
The real specs that all the browsers and media vendors used for DRM are vendor-specific closely guarded secrets, as they have always been.
The only purpose the spec ever had was laundering DRM with W3C's reputation.
Blikkentrekker|3 years ago
That situation truly opened my eyes to the fact that for most people, pragmatic arguments of the kind of “We cannot stop drugs anyway, so we better legalize it, so we can better regulate it.” really seem to only apply when they already agree and that the same people who say it in one case suddenly are staunchly against such pragmaticism when it no longer fly their way.
d.r.m. would be there regardless of what the W.3.C. would do and at the time the lesser of two evils was certainly the W.3.C. having control over the specification to some degree.
I didn't know actually the E.F.F. had such a position, I felt it was the last agent in internet transparency and freedom that hadn't gone insane. It's a sad thing to read but I won't be donating to it any more if such is it's modus operandī.
criddell|3 years ago