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An Open Letter on DRM To the Inventor of the Web, From the Inventor of Net Neutrality (boingboing.net)
Tim Wu, a law professor at the Colombia University, and best known for coining the term "net neutrality," has published an open letter to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In the letter, Wu has asked Berners-Lee to "seriously consider extending a protective covenant to legitimate circumventers who have cause to bypass EME, should it emerge as a W3C standard." Cory Doctorow, writes for BoingBoing: But Wu goes on to draw a connection between the problems of DRM and the problems of network discrimination: DRM is wrapped up in a layer of legal entanglements (notably section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which allow similar kinds of anticompetitive and ugly practices that make net neutrality so important. This is a live issue, too, because the W3C just held the most contentious vote in its decades-long history, on whether to publish a DRM standard for the web without any of the proposed legal protections for companies that create the kinds of competing products and services that the law permits, except when DRM is involved. As Wu points out, this sets up a situation where the incumbents get to create monopolies that produce the same problems for the open web that network neutrality advocates -- like Berners-Lee -- worry about.
When we look at recent browser usage stats we see that Chrome has 50% or more of the market. Safari has about 10%, but it's mainly on mobile devices. Other mobile browsers like UC Browser for Android, Samsung Internet and Opera Mini are about 15%. IE and Firefox are both down to around 5% or 6%. Then there are various minor players.
"Web browser" today means Chrome. If Chrome doesn't support some web technology, then it may as well not exist. If Chrome supports a technology, then Chrome's level of support effectively defines the standard.
So what's the point of the W3C these days?
Is it just to document how Chrome behaves, so the other lesser browser vendors can imitate it more closely?
With such a lack of competition when it comes to web browsers, an organization like the W3C seems to be toothless. Before moz://a ruined Firefox's user experience for so many of its users, at least there was some competition. But that has evaporated.
I don't see how the W3C can be anything other than a glorified documentation writer at this point. Maybe things will change in the future, but it seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Nobody else has been able to compete with Chrome in any meaningful way. The most likely competitor is Firefox, but it seems unlikely to turn its boat around soon. Users keep leaving Firefox, and their Servo effort is going nowhere.
Things are looking really bleak for the web, and I don't think that there's anything that the W3C can do to help.