People called me crazy when I told them that Google was leveraging open source to enact their version of an EEE strategy to kill the open internet. But here we are. They embraced open source, expanded Chromium with unethical practices, and now that they have the monopoly of the space and the main voting power on the W3C, they are ready to destroy all that is free and open about the internet.
I am once again asking users to consider the eventual abandonment of web browsers. It is too big and complex for competition to actually create new ones, so this was inevitable.
[No offense intended to those working on important changes in forks, just saying proportionally it’s only a minor diff, no?]
I’m probably going to use this as a motivation to finally implement serious Digital Minimalism, and just stop using websites that force me to use it.
Banking will be the biggest problem, but other than that, I don’t really need to spend my time on the internet. And this kind of DRM infuriates me so much, that I might just get a life just out of spite.
Any website that implements this API is going to immediately lose me as a user. They can go fuck themselves.
websites that will implement this API:
- your employer
- your bank
websites taht won’t implement this API:
- anything you can choose to quit without significant other consequences to your life
- Website requires user to visit using particular browser
- User refuses to use said browser
- ???
- No profit
But if said website is your bank’s website then you will also have to go change banks and refinance your mortgage, or give up on internet banking. And there could be lots of implications like that we haven’t thought about yet. Wanna buy something using Paypal? You are shit out of luck if they get on the Google DRM train. It’s looking bleak, but hopefully it’ll be seen as being monopolistic if Google is the only one who chooses to implement it, and are thus seen to be abusing their market power to block websites from working properly on other browsers. If Safari and Edge also decide to implement it then we are all probably all screwed though.
That’s good they won’t be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I’m still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that’s still a drag. I don’t like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.
I think Google’s destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn’t have the huge market share they wouldn’t be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.
