And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)
Antitrust lawsuit? What’s that?
When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn’t even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.
They don’t give a fuck and neither do the governments.
Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
Shudders
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
Doesn’t Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?
What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.
Sites that rely on ad revenue would have every business reason to switch to WebDRM-only.
Everyone talks about this like it wouldn’t open a massive attack surface for the mother of DDOS.
Make the attestor slow or take it out, you take down large parts of their business. I don’t know, i wouldn’t put too much stake in a platform/website that could be taken out so completely.
Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it’s all done.
It’s time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
It’s such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.
But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don’t even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.
This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn’t legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they’ll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn’t monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
I’ve always been a proponent of unifying the internet under a single platform, be it Blink or Gecko I don’t really care. Chromium itself was built on FOSS technology, and has its roots in KHTML, which Apple later adopted as WebKit, and Google used and made Blink.
The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn’t get the final say.
All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it’s standard.
Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they’re both Chromium.
Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.
Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub
Ironically I don’t think it would take foot. Many average users I know of use adBlockers - albeit shitty ones - and I don’t think companies would be willing to risk it
