The result: there is now effectively one dominating web browser run by an ad company who nigh unto controls the spec for the web itself and who is finally putting its foot down to decide that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices or to prove that we are using some locked-down component of our otherwise unlocked device to see anyone's content, and they get to frame it as fighting for the user in the spec draft as users have a "need" to prove their authenticity to websites to get their free stuff.
(BTW, Brave is in the same boat: they are also an ad company--despite building ad blocking stuff themselves--and their product managers routinely discuss and even quote Brendan Eich talking about this same kind of "run the browser inside of trusted computing" as their long-term solution for preventing people blocking their ads. The vicious irony: the very tech they want to use to protect them is what will be used to protect the status quo from them! The entire premise of monetizing with ads is eventually either self-defeating or the problem itself.)
The person who wrote the proposal[0] is from Google. All the authors of the proposal are from Google[1].
I've been thinking carefully about this comment, but I really don't know what to say. It's absolutely heartbreaking watching something I really care about die by a thousand cuts; how do we protest this? Google will just strong-arm their implementation through Chromium and, when banks, Netflix & co. start using it, they've effectively cornered other engines into implementing it.
This isn't new to them. They did it with FLoC, which most people were opposed to[2]. The most they did was FLoC was deprecate it and re-release it under a different name.
The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.
[0]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser [1]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/... [2]: >>26344013
You do not and you cannot. It was written in stone once Chrome dominated the browser market. What Chrome (Google) wants, Chrome (Google) gets. Despite all the good engineering Google wants to sell ads, that's all there is to it. And the result is this proposal.
> The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.
It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Unless people switch to FF in droves the web is Chrome. And they won't because at the end of the day people just want to get home from their shitty jobs and stream a show. As long as that works everything else is a non-issue.
It is not like you'll be loosing much. This is the time to change, while we still have other players in the market.
The point is that if chrome implements this, netflix, amazon, facebook etc might decide they'll use this feature and only permit browsers who implement this to use this site.
Even if the only browser that does so is chrome, that's fine because chrome's market share is big enough that they can ignore the rest.
Have fun using Firefox if half of the web locks you out or treats you like a second class citizen.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? It's almost made to sound like surviving without them would be tantamount to starving, but frankly we might be better served without them.
Put another way, my site is unappealing to bots, and frankly I don't care about bot traffic, because I don't have ads. So I don't feel the need to support this server-side.
Equally Amazon makes money selling goods, not ads. They don't need to know if its human or bot, they just need a credit card. [1] Netflix is subscription based, again doesn't care if its a "trusted device" or not. They want you make sure their content is available not blocked because my TV is "untrusted".
Sure, you'll end up using Chrome to use Google properties. But I don't really see the incentive for the non-ad-based Web to bother implementing this.
[1] it won't move the needle for fraud, fraud is easily done via trusted devices.
Amazon is one of the biggest ad networks on earth. They made $40bn from advertising last year using all the personal data they get from their paying customers.
>Netflix is subscription based, again doesn't care if its a "trusted device" or not.
Oh but they do care very much. Netflix requires DRM in desktop browsers and its own app on mobile platforms. And they launched and ad based plan recently.
It's a mistake to believe that advertising is the main problem and direct payments are the solution. Making a payment takes away more privacy than advertising alone ever could and hands personal data to payment schemes and banks on top of everything.