zlacker

>>jakobd+(OP)
This sounds like the final death blow to the web as a useful platform for anyone who isn't a corporation.

>>JohnFe+16
This is bad but how is it going to affect the usefulness of my personal web site, that will never use that API to check who's reading it, not or human? Same thing for a lot of sites, probably the vast majority of them.

>>pmontr+x8
Personal sites likely wouldn't be affected directly. What this will affect is the ecosystem of browsers that people are willing to use. My prediction is that it will slowly strangle independent browser development, which will turn the web into something akin to the Android/iPhone duopoly. This is kind of already the case with browser engines, but because this is DRM, it would extend that same effect to the actual distributed binary (e.g. you can't visit your bank with Chromium on a Debian box, since that wasn't compiled and signed by Google).

> Same thing for a lot of sites, probably the vast majority of them.

Once Google gets this in place, it can then perform these checks through their ads SDK and demonetize traffic from visitors that don't pass the check. This will create an incentive for any site owner that wants to make money through ads to enforce that visitors must use an approved browser. Basically the DRM equivalent of 'Please disable your ad blocker'.

>>rpdill+db
> Basically the DRM equivalent of 'Please disable your ad blocker'. An interesting observation I've had in my own browsing behaviour is that the majority of sites I visit are time wasting visits. If any site presents the above message (or the equivalent - 'sign up to read' like Medium does), I find I just navigate away and do something else.

The bigger concern for me like you call out - major institutions like banks enforcing a separate company's requirements on me in order to interface with them.