zlacker

>>topshe+(OP)
There are many arguments against this but not many brought the implications for search engines.

If websites implement this, it will effectively make building a web search engine impossible for new entrants. The current players can whitelist/attest their own clients while categorizing every other scraping clients as bots.

If not for other reasons, I can't see how Google a search company can be allowed to push something that can kill competition using its market dominance in other areas like browsers.

>>devsda+Iu
Is it possible for them to implement this API in such a way that it will fail 5% of the time or so, making it impossible for websites to deny individuals based on failing attestation?

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

>>dontre+tD
... until Google decides to dial that down to zero for "experience", or Hulu / Netflix makes you disable/whitelist/whatever to access their site.

>>FireBe+lF
But as mentioned above, isn't doing so against Google's own self interest? It seems like the project is explicitly stating their goal isn't to allow for websites to do this, and they are implementing it in a manner consistent with that.

One thing about your comment above: Hulu can't start implementing attestation until Google turns the knob to 0 because they can't start randomly dropping 5% of Chrome users. So in your comment above it should be "and" not "or". If I understand correctly Hulu cannot act unilaterally with the currently planned implementation of this.

If let's say they did turn the knob for Chrome, wouldn't it take a while for websites to start implementing this? For me not knowing as much about this it feels like this is a step in an ambiguous direction which could be good or bad still. But since it's Google everyone is thinking ahead in the causal chain. Can you help me understand why this is such a big and clearly bad step against the open web? Thank you!

>>dontre+iH
I think Hulu is a great example.

Hulu has DRM issues in Firefox and their DRM just fails with unknown errors on about ~15% of content they host (anecdotally, of course, I have no specific data). There's no way for me to tell if a specific episode of a show will fail or not, some succeed, others don't. I at least find no pattern for this. From this perspective, they are essentially randomly breaking 100% of Firefox users some seemingly random percentage of the time.

They have "good" business reasons to require this DRM and whatever this random broken user percentage is, I'm sure it meets their bottom-line criteria as a business.

"95%" uptime for Chrome users is only "one-9", but it's still got that one 9. That's an acceptable SLA to many businesses. A business might easily decide attestation is worth that "uptime risk" because it sells more ads or makes the DRM vendors happier (and thus the content owners are happier) or any other number of "good" business reasons.