Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs
&gt; <i>The browser ecosystem is weaker than it’s ever been</i><p>This kind of hyperbole undermines the whole argument.  The browser ecosystem was weakest when Microsoft released IE6 and then decided to not update it for half a decade.  Today, by comparison, we are living in a land of plenty.<p>Even on the DRM front, the situation was no better in the past when you had to use Flash or Silverlight for DRM.  At least now there is a clean interface to just the video decryption without requiring a whole bloated proprietary plugin.  I don&#x27;t quite understand the ideological bent that EME corrupts an open standard, but the same result from NPAPI is somehow less objectionable?<p>If the hope is that by standards bodies rejecting DRM on principle they will somehow strong-arm Big Content, I can tell you unequivocally that it ain&#x27;t gonna happen.  Cory Doctorow has not spent the last 10 years building a feature film streaming service and negotiating with rightsholders, but I have.  In fact I spent most of that time fighting against DRM on a UX basis and trying to find loopholes, which works for small distributors but not for the studios.  The torrent crowd would have you believe it&#x27;s because they&#x27;re stupid, but Big Content is anything but stupid.  They know that there is no such thing as guaranteed copy protection and that there will always be an analog loophole.  The reason they insist on DRM is as a means of control.  They just need enough roadblocks in front of casual piracy to prevent devaluation of their content.  If they were unwilling to accept any piracy they wouldn&#x27;t stream to PCs at all.  Which, BTW, is exactly what would happen if we succeed in outlawing DRM on PCs.  They would literally pull the content, and say if you want to watch go buy an Approved Device.  Customers wouldn&#x27;t bat an eye either, because people prefer to watch on a television anyway; cheap streaming boxes &#x2F; smart TVs are the future, not general purpose web browsers.<p>Making a huge issue of EME is just asinine and belies a complete ignorance of the market forces at work here.  The studios have all the power, browser makers do not have any leverage.  And in any case, if rightsholders want to play a cat and mouse game with DRM that should be their prerogative, but customers should also have the freedom to circumvent those measures.  Where we need to focus our lobbying efforts is against the DMCA and infinite Copyright extension  which broadly impacts consumer rights and the public benefit.