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Google Quietly Makes 'Optional' Web DRM Mandatory In Chrome (boingboing.net)
JustAnotherOldGuy quotes a report from Boing Boing: The World Wide Web Consortium's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a DRM system for web video, being pushed by Netflix, movie studios, and a few broadcasters. It's been hugely controversial within the W3C and outside of it, but one argument that DRM defenders have made throughout the debate is that the DRM is optional, and if you don't like it, you don't have to use it. That's not true any more. Some time in the past few days, Google quietly updated Chrome (and derivative browsers like Chromium) so that Widevine (Google's version of EME) can no longer be disabled; it comes switched on and installed in every Chrome instance. Because of laws like section 1201 of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and Canada's Bill C11, and EU implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD), browsers that have DRM in them are risky for security researchers to audit. These laws provide both criminal and civil penalties for those who tamper with DRM, even for legal, legitimate purposes, and courts and companies have interpreted this to mean that companies can punish security researchers who reveal defects in their products. Further reading: Boing Boing and Hacker News.
Don't care about netflix so bye bye chrome.
They've moved the options regarding Flash and PDF Reader plugins. Widevine is not listed nor given the option to be disabled within the UI.
Also these are Plugins not Extensions, two entirely different things.
See related story here. You can no longer remove that plugin. As for chromium you could always compile your own version to allow you to remove the plugin in question but it's probably easier (and better in principle) just to dump chrome and it's offshoots altogether.