Mentions Apple Inc.

A good explainer:

In 2017, the body responsible for standardizing web browser technologies, W3C, introduced Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—thus bringing with it the end of competitive indie web browsers.

No longer is it possible to build your own web browser capable of consuming some of the most popular content on the web. Websites like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and others require copyright content protection which is only accessible through browser vendors who have license agreements with large corporations.

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These roadblocks were primarily introduced to appease the media industry.

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Since the introduction of EME to web standards, the ability for new browsers to compete has become restricted by gatekeepers, which goes against the promises of the platform.

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

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Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? 

Google intended its Web Environment Integrity API, announced on a developer mailing list in May, to serve as a way to limit online fraud and abuse without enabling privacy problems like cross-site tracking or browser fingerprinting.

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To do this, the system would need to check, via attestation, whether the visitor's software and hardware stack met certain criteria and thus was authentic. That's great until it's abused to turn away visitors who have a setup a website owner isn't happy with – such as running a content blocker or video downloader.

Technical types saw this immediately, and became concerned that Google wanted to create a form of digital rights/restriction management (DRM) for the web. One benefit could be that ad fraud might be easier to prevent; but the risk is that the API could be used to limit web freedom, by giving websites or third-parties a say in the browser and software stack used by visitors.

Apple incidentally has already shipped its own attestation scheme called Private Access Tokens, which while it presents some of the same concerns is arguably less worrisome than Google's proposal because Safari's overall share of the web browser market across all devices is far lower than Chrome's.