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Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser

2y 10mon ago by lemmy.blackeco.com/u/BlackEco in privacy@lemmy.ml from github.com

And since you won't be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.

The community feedback is... interesting to say the least.

What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

This isn't even close to being okay. It's 100% bullshit.

Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.

A lot of them never had to make a profit before.

Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it's like buying a lotto scratcher.

The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.

That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.

If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be "Oh great yet another subscription", because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people's income each month.

But what if greedy neoliberals hadn't been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.

Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There's always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. "If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!".

Inflation just means "If rich people find out you've got more money, they'll fuck you out of that too".

The $1 will never be enough. They'll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they'll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood -- whatever makes them a few more cents.

And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn't really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.

With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there's a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.

It's like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don't need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately

Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I'll have a home server I can use for the things I can't use on the cloud

The enshittification of the internet shall continue.

We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.

We're on Lemmy. We're already winning!

We may win a battle or few, but not the war.

Then i'll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.

All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.

We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.

That is super awesome, but yeah, sounds like the kinda thing you should keep underground. Too many cool projects have been killed because they went public.

But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌

I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.. That's how they've been brainwashing us till now.

You'll finish your enshittification and you'll like it!

I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.

I don't think it's coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they've really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don't understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they've already made a decision, they decide it's because we don't understand the squeeze they're under to make money.

  • Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing's a disaster because that's really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there's some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
  • Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
  • Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they're doing. They're ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they're doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they're doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They've learned the following lesson: if you're big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it

I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Right? I had a subscription for Apollo and am now supporting kbin on Patreon (btw, guys, here’s the link if someone wants to help out).

It wasn’t that hard to offer a product that people would be fine paying for.

That's a good write up, thanks. I don't claim it's coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.

Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven't heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can't not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it's not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it's a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I'm kinda curious now

I'd be happy to hear that's true. They were originally an aggregator until Google changed their api

Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.

His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?

I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.

Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks... I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I'm looking for with DDG. :/

I'm using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can't seem to find sites that aren't SEO traps.

Startpage might be something for you, mixed bag though but I got nothing of substance to say against it.

DuckDuckGo seems, for me anyway, be crappier and crappier by the month. Am I the only one? Are there alternatives?

SearXNG and LibreX are both meta search engines, which combine results from several different search engines.

I used them for a long time before getting tired of appending !g after every search because DDG's results were SEO garbage. I'm trying them again and they seem to be slightly better, but I'm not quite sure. Also it appears that the minus operator doesn't work on DDG, and when I have to use it, I just do !s to search Google with Startpage (which I don't use because it's owned by an ad company and because its website is a little bit slower than DDG).

DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it's own crawler.

It can be a combo of several objectives:

  • make a shitload of money
  • stop people from realising we're making a shitload of money off of their backs
  • keep people poor so that even if they do realise there's nothing they can do about it

Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding "reddit" at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.

And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.

So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.

Hello from Kagi. It's better over here.

Yeah I've been a little interested in trying Kagi, but it is quite expensive... Are the results that much better?

They give you a couple searches for free each month (I think it's 10) - go try it out!

Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It's just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they're cashing in on their investment.

Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it's usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there's really very little that can be done.

The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.

Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?

Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn't just Google. It's the entire tech sector.

Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.

We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.

Yes, which works for the few, but they know that the majority are completely oblivious and will just consume whatever they are given.

I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw

Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.

Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.

Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.

Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money

What do you mean, Google of all companies... It's a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can't quit their services.

Plus they've already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can't be actioned for it.

Since when was PWA proprietary?

Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that's fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.

The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.

Check out "enshittification"

This happens when something, in this case the Internet, is a monopoly or oligopoly.

Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube's inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user's and drain their wallets.

Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.

AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.

A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it

What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.

One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.

I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.

Obligatory use Firefox

Let's hope there's already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don't like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.

I was just thinking that I'm sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.

It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware

What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore in light of not only this, but everything that they've done in the 21st century? Why do we keep listening to them? Why don't we build our own networks and design our own chips?

because that would cost a rather large amount of money, which us working-class peasants famously don't have

What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore

The Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court.

Why do we keep listening to them?

Democracy, loyalty, nationalism, trillions of dollars, global power, the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, FBI, CIA, local and federal police, the largest surveillance network in the world, thousands of prisons, and a million other reasons.

Since this is something that can be used as a DRM solution, hacking it might be already illegal under the DMCA. IANAL though.

With how shittily Chrome has been running for me lately, I'm feeling like making the switch to Firefox sooner and sooner.

I guess now is one of those famous best times to do it. If you want even more privacy and security ootb, you can try Librewolf. Recently released Mullvad Browser seems to be pretty up there too, at least from what I've read so far.

And if you're on Android, Mull is pretty much for Smartphones what Librewolf is for Desktops.

What additions does Librewolf have over stock Firefox? I haven’t been using FF for a week now with Ublock Origin and it has been great.

It pretty much has all the possible settings (on and under the hood) for more privacy and security applied ootb, and comes with uBlock Origin.

Technically, you can achieve the same result by configuring base Firefox yourself, but why do that if someone else already did the work for you

use Firefox

been doing that since I left Internet Explorer, aeons ago

The EU is rapidly becoming a neoliberal hellehole resembling the US. I no longer have any hope for existing institutions resisting corporate encroachment. Best that can be done is the support of initiatives like the fediverse and foss in general but if the current trend continues even that is in a precarious position.

The EU is so utterly out of whack right now.

You got the proposal of chat control on one hand, and stuff like replaceable batteries on the other.

Like, make up your mind already, do you want to help your citizens or not? It's almost like they do it on purpose to keep our expectations in check.

Obligatory use Firefox

No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I'm using now? For Mozilla's CEO to rais her wage (again): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html?

You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).

Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can't stand different opinions.

What's your alternative?

EDIT: Oh I just found in the profile. It's Brave. I used it for half a year before I got tired of the crypto ads sneaking into my home page's links no matter how many times I deleted them and of some other stuff. I prefer Firefox's UI. Also I don't expect any browser to be 100% ethical but Brave is below Firefox in that list for me

If you truly cared about the state of the internet youd only browse websites with wget and text editors

Or something

https://lynx.invisible-island.net/come now, we don't have to be barbarians, there's text browsers out there

Nice detective skills. I have the opposite view about Brave/Mozilla. But fine, we can agree to disagree and still be (virtual) friends.

Opposite view of what? Brave is peddling crypto bullshit

Then you must find yourself very amusing

We don’t wanna be friends with crypto-bros here.

Cool. On my part I, as a non crypto-bro, don't want to be friends with stupid people. So, I'll ignore you from now on.

Nice one mate. Looks like your personality is well-received here. Maybe going back to Reddit might suit you better.

It doesn't matter and it's irrelevant here. I just despise Mozilla and their false morality. Use whatever you want.

It's not irrelevant since you stated Firefox is less good than what you are using now. Of course people are interested in a feasible alternative. So, since you introduced it, what are you using instead?

I said that I feel it's less good. I'm not going to tell people what they should use and I surely won't tell them to use the same browser I use. People should simply use whatever they prefer/suits them best.

I didn't know I was so evil that I'm doing the world a worse place just because I prefer a different browser. And I'm ideologically far form alt-right, btw.

OTOH, talking about corporate greed:

that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.

Also it does not have any information on source of the data, methodology, definition of the terms etc. So it is pretty much worthless as an argument.

that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.

Fine, so on the same basis we can also reject the "chromium dominance" argument, which is the main selling point of Mozilla.

On that last point, nope.

I dunno. Using Microsoft Edge feels like good enough for me.

That doesnt really have anything to do with what I said?

That said, the reason Edge feels like good enough for you is probably because you don't know very much about / haven't tried other browsers.

Nice to know that you downvoted me for no actual reason, as I didn't make any "case". Have a candy.

??? What's your point even? Usually when someone attempts an argument they have some information.

He's concern trolling for big corporate, probably. Or just angry. Possibly both.

I feel obligated to raise awareness about these topics. I won't prevent anyone from choosing Chrome, but at the very least it's important for people to know what their choice can entail, and base their decision on that.

We also need to raise awareness about what giving google hegemony over defining what the web will be means.

I won't prevent anyone from using FF, either. I just think that the "obligatory use Firefox" is quite arrogant, to say the least. And, to be honest, I'm quite happy it's not going to happen until FF is managed by Mozilla and their poor choices.

The obligatory use Firefox has been a running gag in the FOSS community for ages now. Nothing arrogant about it, though it does come across as a bit blunt and brazen, to be fair.

It's just that letting a single entity be the ultimate authority on how the internet (or anything, for that matter) should look like is objectively a bad idea.

Especially when that entity is widely known for being insidiously self serving, malicious and manipulative.

That being said, enough people have explained this already, so I'm gonna leave it there.

Have a nice day

There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That's quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It's one of the richest companies in the world.

Firefox doesn't have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.

And it just became faster than chrome as well.

The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you

It's not for me (anymore). It should be for you. She was raising her salary while firing devs... But whatever. Mozillians are seldom rational.

Keep being delusional, It's free, after all.

I don't have to point anybody in the direction of anything. Make your choices as I did mines.

Internet Explorer 6.0

pah, reject graphical browsing entirely, return to lynx.

Dude, look, I'm sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.

They're not saying you should feel obligated to use Firefox. It's a tongue-in-cheek joke about how everything FLOSS, Privacy or GDPR related always includes a comment thread about using Firefox. I use Brave too but you gotta read the room. Lemmy users in general are going to be much more pro-Firefox than anything else.

I understand. I just feel it's quite arrogant ans annoying to be (indirectly) schooled by strangers on the internet who think they know better.

UX is not worse than Chrome, please shut up.

What do you use?

Not Firefox.

It's IE isn't it?

It’s Brave. Gotta get that crypto!

You criticize but don't even have the balls to name your browser? To back up your claims?

That is pathetic.

It's Brave, as evidenced in their history. The browser that peddles crypto ads, has a transphobe CEO, and has been accused of selling copyrighted data

You forgot to list autocompleting urls with affiliate code without the user consent

I surely deserve death for using a browser you don't like. Jeez, people can be so obtuse sometimes...

I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like.

I'm not sure how you managed to come to that conclusion. You claimed Firefox is a poor choice, I'm demonstrating why I believe your alternative choice is worse. Nevermind the fact that use of Chromium is effectively an acceptance of Google's monopoly over the web standards, which is the point we're all arguing here. If you can't handle criticism you should reconsider making such hyperbolic remarks.

It’s Brave btw lawl

Someone just insulted me and called me "alt-right" person or "crypto bro" (I'm neither of both). So, do you really think that I'm the pathetic one?

And... Which "claims", by the way? I just said that I'm annoyed by people telling me "I should" do something and that I'll decide by myself. Full stop. Coherently, I'm not giving you alternatives nor have I to disclose anything.

Sometimes it looks like one has to apologize for using Brave or Vivaldi or any other shit that didn't come out from Mozilla's ass. Keep using FF if this makes you happy. It made me happy for 20 years, but then I got fed up by 1) Mozilla, 2) Mozilla's community 3) The browser itself.

Don't worry. One day Mozillians will receive a reality bath and realise the farce they have supported.

People should be attacking your idea, not their perception of you based on your choice in browser.

My objection with Brave, Vivaldi, and other other browser that is just Chrome with a different skin of paint is they are all signalling an acceptance of Google's monopoly over the web standards ecosystem.

Mozilla is a shit organization run by a shit CEO, but they're the only alternative we have to the megalith that is the advertising company known as Google. It really shouldn't be a hard argument to understand that putting an advertising company at the head of the web standards process is a really bad idea if you care about anything other than Google's revenue streams, ie a free and open web.

Chromium only exists as a way for Google to keep antitrust regulators from coming after them like they did to Microsoft when IE had a monopoly. It's source-available, not open source, they don't accept commits from non-Googlers. The moment they feel safe closing down the Chromium repos without having to lose too much money in fines or blowback, they absolutely will.

We're literally watching this happen right now with Android, another formally open source project from Google that is slowly having all of its open source components clawed back so that they can maintain their control over the ecosystem and protect the revenue stream that is their data collection and app store.

When Google inevitably decides to pull the plug on Chromium the collective of forked browser developers is not going to be able to keep up with the massive engineering effort required to keep a modern browser going. Especially when a corporation like Google can and will push forward complex and difficult to implement standards expressly for the purpose of making those forks obsolete. They have the manpower, capital, and control over massive web properties to effectively push out anyone they don't want.

All it takes is them making a change to Youtube that hinders alternative browsers and that will be the death of that open source ecosystem. They've literally pulled this exact move before with Youtube by hindering Firefox's performance by pushing through the implementation of shadow DOM.

All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Trusting an advertising company with control of the open web is the nerd equivalent of leopards ate my face

I think they probably use Netscape

Indeed, I'd love Seamonkey to be a viable alternative, for instance.

This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet

Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.

Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this "Web DRM".

My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).

It's such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it's too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn't a de facto browser monopoly.

It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.

I've always been a proponent of unifying the internet under a single platform, be it Blink or Gecko I don't really care. Chromium itself was built on FOSS technology, and has its roots in KHTML, which Apple later adopted as WebKit, and Google used and made Blink.

The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn't get the final say.

As far as I'm concerned, the web should be developed through universal standards (the World Wide Web Consortium takes care of that), while the job of rendering engines should be reduced to following these standards the best they can.

following these standards as best they can

This is precisely why I want a unified web. I hate adding flags for support and testing across different systems. It’s a massive bother, and ultimately means you’ll test one platform and just hope for the best on the rest because that’s what you have time for.

The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn’t get the final say.

EU investigation is already underway for their ad business. Not sure that would apply to Chromium but owning the ad delivery, the website, AND the software that renders it should be considered.

For what it’s worth, this comment just inspired me to switch my work PC from edge to Firefox. Was already using it in Linux, and will switch my home PC tonight.

It's such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.

But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don't even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.

This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn't legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they'll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn't monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.

All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it's standard.

Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they're both Chromium.

Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don't really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.

Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet's favorite content hub

It makes sense that they have YouTube in their sights for DRM lockdown.

Ironically I don’t think it would take foot. Many average users I know of use adBlockers - albeit shitty ones - and I don’t think companies would be willing to risk it

I don't know: people I know don't always use ad-blockers and if they do they have no idea that they are less effective on Chrome than on Firefox.

Also they all have been brainwashed to use Chrome because it was marketed as "faster, better and safer" all those years ago and wouldn't even think of switching browsers (or it would be for another Chromium-based one)

People at home aren't what matters. Companies will absolutely use it when it's the next upgrade and deemed secure by whoever it is that keeps telling them to only use chrome and IE/Edge.

Reminds me of Microsoft with the ActivePlatform / Blackbird stuff in the 90s.

Awful to see Google turn into that.

Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it's all done.

It's time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.

We kinda have the small web (Gemini & Gopher), but it is a different, much simpler format than html (Gopher is literally plaintext)

I remember gopher but I haven't used it for about 30 years. Does anyone still use that?

Sites that rely on ad revenue would have every business reason to switch to WebDRM-only.

Everyone talks about this like it wouldn't open a massive attack surface for the mother of DDOS.

Make the attestor slow or take it out, you take down large parts of their business. I don't know, i wouldn't put too much stake in a platform/website that could be taken out so completely.

Hmmm, that's a good point. It would probably be using some of the DDOS protection services. But make it cost enough and it may not be worth it for the corporations to continue that shit.

Doesn't Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?

What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.

Oh... thanks.

ERROR! Piracy detected!

I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)

Antitrust lawsuit? What's that?

When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn't even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.

They don't give a fuck and neither do the governments.

Sounds like EU will come for the rescue. In 2029...

Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
Shudders

It makes such complete sense for Google and Microsoft that it's a wonder we didn't see it coming sooner.

Not just Chromium, but the proprietary binary Chrome. Chromium can still be modified to block ads.

I would stop visiting any website that implements this. Simple as that. I will step away (will try at least) from any system that doesn't respect my privacy or myself. Like I ditched Facebook, Reddit and others.

Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)

Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.

That's a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I'm being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It's really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don't move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.

Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds

And they went ahead and blocked comments now - "An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past."

Fucking cowards

EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don't pay the big tech you can't access anything.

Oh do fuck off Google.

How can the smartest people be so dumb?

Please, please, PLEASE.. if you care about a healthy open internet, donate to Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF, at the minimum, if you're able to.

I liked to subscribe to Youtube Premium to support my favourite channels but this kinda stuff turns me off.

So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?

Hopefully we won't have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition

This may honestly be it for me.

I quit playing games because of all the greed and hype, I went back to piracy when streaming started to fracture and greed set in, I left non-federated social media because of the enshittifaction and invasiveness, and I go to fairly extensive lengths to block ads and protect my privacy as much as possible...

And instead of moving to any number of fair, non-exploitive business models, they're just going to force ads down my throat like that episode of black mirror.

If this goes through I'll be sorely tempted to wipe everything I can and start over as best I can. Only interact with the Internet when I need to.

You'll find me paying cash at the local used bookstore, at least until all the major publishers make that illegal.

EDIT: It's honestly depressing, I genuinely enjoy technology and the internet, but when companies like Google are able to force garbage like this it just sucks all the joy out of it for me.

It's like everying is becoming a shitty mobile game. Do the toolsheds that develop Candy Crush clones not think we can understand why in app currencies are sold in bundles of 100 but every thing we purchase with them requires amounts that end with a five? Does Google not think we know the real motivation behind a system that strives to prove ads were delivered to your browser either?

I know a lot of people may not see the real driver here, but I'm tired of being underestimated and infantalized by a bunch of dorks trapped in a corporate echo chamber. I think I'd prefer it if they just straight up said they're going to sacrifice our privacy and user experience for a quick bump in stock value.

This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn't be part of the web standards. It's very existence is abuse and this use even more so.

DRM needs to be illegal.

Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/pull/124/commits/7cd99782c90bab4104725e821d11b18bc2107218

This PR nails it

I already replaced my search engine, my social media and my Reddit.

Do you want me to replace my email too, Google?

Google is hindrance to open web, like IE7 was with ActiveX.

Only difference is that IE7 wanted developers to develop for IE7, while Google also want to fully control the web and bend it according to its needs

And there’s zero chance of some other company dethroning Chrome like IE was. The only way that happens is with government intervention to protect the free market.

But of course antitrust enforcement is dead in this country, so that’s not happening. Just look at the obviously anticompetitive Activision acquisition that went through recently. Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.

I'm old enough to remember when the line was "IE has 90% marketshare and nothing's going to change that"

Yes the landscape is different now, but these are free apps and there are competitors out there. It takes only a few minutes to switch to Firefox. Google's hold on this market is not as ironclad as people may think.

Mozilla Foundation is kept alive with Google money, for the express purpose of being able to show there's an alternative and that Chrome is not technically a monopoly. But Firefox will never challenge Chrome on anything that truly matters.

It's not just for that. They do make money out of being the default search engine. Safari exists, Google doesn't need Mozilla to avoid anti-trust lawsuits.

Mozilla Foundation is kept alive with Google money, for the express purpose of being able to show there’s an alternative and that Chrome is not technically a monopoly.

Circa 1997: Apple, Inc is kept alive with Microsoft money ($150 million), for the express purpose of being able to show there's an alternative and that Windows is not technically a monopoly.

This a conspiracy, or validated claim? Either way, I believe it.

You have https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates(I haven't read that article because I didn't allow javascript there or something), and https://www.wired.com/2011/12/why-google-continues-to-fund-firefox/

Not necessarily explicitly supporting the claim made above, but the information is interesting.

Thanks. Can't say I'm surprised..

Seems a necessary arrangement to keep Mozilla alive and Google on the throne. After reading that, I doubt it's possible for Firefox to ever get out from under Google's wing, but I can see Google eventually tossing Firefox from the nest. I guess that's how business works...

If Google gets this going, Firefox has the choice of either adopting the same DRM support or being perceived as that browser where websites don't work properly like they do in Chrome. It'll be hard to persuade people who don't understand what's going on to adopt it out of principle. Something like this already happened with the media DRM support that browsers currently have.

And I already hate the media DRM stuff and have it disabled in my browsers.

Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.

They just think that giant corporations are good for politicians.

It doesn't seem to be targeting ad-blockers in particular (or other page customizing extensions), although that may result eventually. What it does do is let webpages restrict what web browsers and operating systems you are allowed to use, just like how SafetyNet on Android lets apps restrict you to using an OS signed by Google. That could end up with web pages forcing you to use a web browser and OS the big players like Google, Microsoft and Apple, blocking any less restrictive or less used competors like Firefox and Linux, thus creating a cryptographically enforced oligopoly. And even if they signed e.g. Firefox, it would only be certain builds of it. That would make it impossible to make a truly open-source browser that can access pages using this API. Quite concerning.

They've really strongly adopted their new "Do only evil" mantra

Having thought about it for a bit, it's possible for this proposal to be abused by authoritarian governments.

Suppose a government—say, Wadiya—mandated that all websites allowed on the Wadiyan Internet must ensure that visitors are using a list of verified browsers. This list is provided by the Wadiyan government, and includes: Wadiya On-Line, Wadiya Explorer, and WadiyaScape Navigator. All three of those browsers are developed in cooperation with the Wadiyan government.

Each of those browsers also happen to send a list of visited URLs to a Wadiyan government agency, and routinely scan the hard drive for material deemed "anti-social."

Because the attestations are cryptographically verified, citizens would not be able to fake the browser environment. They couldn't just download Firefox and install an extension to pretend to be Wadiya Explorer; they would actually have to install the spyware browser to be able to browse websites available on the Wadiyan Internet.

This is super fucked up. I use Stylus extensively to customize the UI on so many sites. Not even for adblocking or that kind of thing, but for accessibility. I actually learned to code many years ago specifically so I could write my own userstyles so that popular websites would be more accessible for me. This is not just predatory on an ads and money level but on an accessibility level too.

I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn't put into cramming ever more ads into people's eyeballs.

I literally swapped to Librewolf before the Rossman video was done. I was on Brave Browser before, but it's based on Chromium. Fuck Chromium and fuck Google. Fuck this shitty amoeba that tries to spread into and control everything.

I will post stupid shit on my de federated forum and you will fucking live with it Google. Fuck you. Burn. It's time to break up the internet monopolies and do some trust busting. Someone pull FDR's rotten corpse out of the grave and put it back to work.

Ads have already been proven to be an extremely ineffective marketing strategy; now Google wants to force them down our throats even more? Fuck off

Google saw the enshitening of the web and went "hold my beer, I'll show you how it's done!".

Big fan of the "how dare you don't use professional language" vibe coming from the folks clinically discussing how to ruin what little remains of the open web.

I hope Louis Rossmann catches wind of this - the more people know about this, the better chance we have at stopping this unnecessary "WEI" spec.

If an company wants a trusted environment for their code to execute in, they should be asking themselves why they're not running that code in an app, or better yet - on their own servers

Can someone give me an easy to understand example of what they are proposing? Assume that I don’t allow them to install any software/tool that helps them track me/my device.

I saw this comment and found it helpful but its still not clear to me

At its core, it establishes software components called "attesters" that decide whether your device and/or browser is "trustworthy" enough - as defined by the website you are trying to visit. Websites can enforce which "attesters" users must accept, simply by denying everybody access who refuses to bow down to this regime; or who uses attesters that are deemed "inappropriate"; or who is on a platform that does not provide any attesters the website finds "acceptable".

In short: it is specifically designed to destroy the open web by denying you the right to use whatever browser you want to use, on whatever operating system. It is next-level "DRM", introduced by affiliates of a company that already has monopolized the browser market. And the creators of this "proposal" absolutely know what they are attempting here.

And they try to demonise Tor and I2P... At this rate, the dark web would soon be the only place to go.

stop using their services

Non-goals [...] Enforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions. [...]

But guys they gave their pinky promise it's totally fine

let's just allow them to irreversibly make this change so that there is nothing preventing them from applying this totally Non-Goals in the future what could happen

Also

Challenges and threats to address
[...] Tracking users’ browser history User agents will not provide any browsing information to attesters when requesting a token. We are researching an issuer-attester split that prevents the attester from tracking users at scale, while allowing for a limited number of attestations to be inspected for debugging—with transparency reporting and auditability [...]

Cross-site tracking
While attestation tokens will not include information to identify unique users, the attestation tokens themselves could enable cross-site tracking if they are re-used between sites. For example, two colluding sites could work out that the same user visited their sites if a token contains any unique cryptographic keys and was shared between their sites.

Good to see where your priorities lie in terms of user protection when deciding to launch this into conversation. Dude idk we'll fix it later don't worry bro

Perhaps most tellingly:

<i>Todo</i>

## Privacy considerations ## {#privacy}

<i>Todo</i>

If that’s the level of seriousness they treat user privacy with, these engineers deserve to be lambasted.

This is a conscious abrogation of engineering ethics, and as a software engineer myself, it offends me immensely. It makes me and my entire profession look bad.

That doesn't represent disinterest by the developers. In fact, that's a big red circled F on a report card to them, and including that comment is intentionally bringing attention to a glaring deficiency. It's very likely that they have a plugin implemented in their IDE which surfaces TODO items vividly, and their associated Jira task or epic can't be closed out until all of the remaining work is complete.

I'd be more worried if the code presented a clear danger to privacy and DIDN'T directly address concerns in one form or another. You should be praising this dev for raising awareness to his peers and making sure this gets done, not the opposite.

I’m a software engineer. I know what a TODO is.

My point is that privacy should have been a core design consideration, not something you factor in and handle later as a secondary concern. Put another way: the initial problem thesis that they wrote a proposal to solve should have included the idea of user privacy as a core element.

It’s a matter of incorrectly prioritized design goals that yield something which has very obvious potential to be actively harmful to users.

Lol. Just like Google used to say "Don't be evil."

Wonder when this text will receive a similar strikethrough.

Well I won't visit a site that is full of ads now without an ad blocker, so why would the fact that o can't block the ads change my mind. As soon as a site blocks content for having an ad blocker or immediately starts popping up tons of stuff that's nearly impossible to close, I leave.

How do Google Employees sleep at night?

I'm using a VPN right now and Google keeps doing the captcha request thing and loops as if it's broken. Never had this problem before.

Firefox gang come on!

That also destroys the openess of the design. They already DRMed up the media, why the whole page? It will kill transparency completely

Companies like google should really not have so much power. I have stopped using chrome 1 year ago, and i am thinking about switching to a browser that doesn´t use chromium.

why are they trying to restrict and control the internet? on the plus side I guess I'll go outside more, touch grass, forget this crap exists and enjoy other facets of life. It's just sad to see it be transformed into this pile of crap.

Fuck Google

Before everyone starts complaining, remember:
This is for the ads. There are millions of starving ads on the internet right now. For just a click and load a day on every ad you see you too can help a billion dollar company survive.

Google proving why it removed its old motto "Don't be evil."

"Please click on all the crosswalks before you can enter this site"
This is why people pirate things.

In total, I've probably already spent weeks on completing captcha. It often takes me up to 5 minutes, "try again, try again, try again, wasn't able to verify try again later,..."

Missed a traffic light!

Apparently, doing a captcha right the first time reeks of robot, and deliberately clicking a wrong tile, before deselecting it again to complete it looks more human.

I have no idea if that's actually a thing or not, but the few times I've tried it, the very first captcha accepted me right away, so idk.

Makes me want to donate to Firefox, not the Mozilla Foundation. To Firefox.

Here are the github repository, issues and comments immortalised for posterity in IPFS:

The issues and comments are in github json format -- if anyone wants to collate them into a human-readable text or html file, please do so.

Edit: Its immortality of course depends on you to access and pin the content.

What a bunch of scumbags.

Wow. This rubs me the wrong way. Hope there's a way to crush this....

Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it. This trust is the backbone of the open internet, critical for the safety of user data and for the sustainability of the website’s business.

Jesus christ just the introduction paragraph is a load of horseshit. Actually bold faced lies. Users depend on websites trusting the client? In what fucking world are websites trusting the client??? Literally the only case is the media DRM that should have never been part of the web in the first place.

I guess Do No Harm is going really well

This sounds so sad

Create a browser that creates a live 4K video stream of any visited page then uses AI to identify ads on the page and cover them with a solid matching the pages color.

If this were to become a thing, couldn't you take the html and insert the content into a locally generated page and modify that?

This seems so ridiculous. I'm coming from a privacy perspective. I'm using a number of extensions that block as many trackers as possible. Now I may have to give that up just so someone can "attest" to my identity. I'll have to forgo my privacy, otherwise I can't use the web.

Can someone please explain to me, a dumdum, why I should be blaming the engineers rather than the people pulling their strings?

Geez this would suck but as with other drm I’m sure the de-drm plug-in would follow

I'm afraid that browsers supporting this DRM would also block attempts to break it and that browsers that do not support it get blocked by websites using it

I haven't thought this through, but if you had a headless browser acting as a proxy, couldn't that pass the un-drm HTML & other resources to your actual browser?

I guess the drm stuff would be embedded in the js so it would have to block all js, so this wouldn't work for the majority of the modern web.

I think the point is to reduce ad blocker usage among the average person. Techier people will figure out a workaround, and of course the people making botnets will too.

So they’re destroying the open web to squeeze a few extra pennies out of a subset of ad block users.

Yes and no. Yes because the process would work in theory. No because the attestor (supposedly the OS?) wouldn't attest your "headless proxy browser" as legitimate client.

Using a proxy would move the battlefield to how to trick the attestor. But realistically the whole thing will go down this route anyway. It's another arms race. At the very end they'll require cryptographic chips soldered into your device which make sure you're not sideloading any software before running the OS, which would allow you to trick the legitimate attestor of the OS.

This is just terrible.

However, while it does add a layer of annoyance that'll mess things up for most, like any DRM, it fundamentally is unsound and will get cracked. Us good people have a big incentive to do so here. Reading the spec, it still relies on a trusted party (expected to be the OS) and, unlike ie. games consoles, we already have admin access to that party from the get go.

Where it could be a problem is mobile phones. They could target browsers that support ad blocking and you'd probably need to root the phone to get past that.

Is these a real google plan, or just an engineer proposal on github?

It's 4 Google engineers. They sure as shit didnt start this as a pet project.

For the moment, just the later. Let's hope it won't gain steam.

That's how they do it. They send their "proposal" and immediately implement it in Chrome (with work on that being started long before "proposal" is made public obviously). Then they start using it on their own websites (with compatibility for now) and start propaganda campaign to push webdevs to use it too (which they do of course). Then they start complaining that other browsers' developers are slow to implement this new "standard" (at this stage they won't call it a "proposal" anymore) and are "stifling development of the web" or being actively malicious because they are jealous of Chrome or something. Then compatibility mode on their websites is first subtly broken so that users once again will witness how Chrome is superior browser and then removed outright. Boom, we have a new web standard!

If Google was actually thinking about it maybe this is how they would test the waters.

They can just disclaim it as employee opinion if it doesn't go well.

Definitely time to make our own internet, with hookers and blow.

TOR

We should harass the fuck out of this guy until he removes it. This shit is completely uncalled for.

Greed kills everything good

Well time learn how to jailbreak web pages now too

Also fun to read this (by Google employee): https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_like/I literally snacked popcorn.

Web 3.0 - users, kindly go fuck yourselves p.s. pay us subscription money and view lots of ads

I remember watching Chrome fill up long lists of ??? in the task manager, back when I still used Windows and Chrome on an old Laptop. Both CPU and RAM were working at their utmost and that shit blocked everything.

This has to be seen in context of AI - Google will offer this to companies to ‘protect their pages from being scraped’

I ditched Chrome about a year ago for Edge and just recently switched to Firefox, shouldn't really be concerning as long as there are alternatives.

I find it hard to see how they could protect content from ad blockers without also crippling pages that self modify their own content. Perhaps they could put headers akin to content security policy that forbids external modification. Assuming a browser were to honour that header I could see bad publicity and a lot of people just moving to another browser which doesn't. Additionally, ad blockers aren't the only things that modify pages - breaking accessibility add ons could be more negative publicity (just like with Reddit).

I think browsers would be best off to let websites develop countermeasures if they're so sore about ad blockers. Perhaps they could use "self healing" Javascript libraries that put back content which is removed. Or they could just refuse to work if they detect an ad blocker, e.g. they stick some canaries in the DOM or along blocked paths to see if an ad blocker is present.

I doubt it's the engineers.

Can someone explain how the server is going to know whether or not the client browser is showing the ad? A stealthy browser would say, "hey yeah send that ad so I can render it to the user" and the server says, "yeah ok" and then <doesntRenderAdOnClientDevice>. How is the server going to know whether the ad is displayed or not? Don't current gen adblockers not even retrieve the asset? If the asset was retrieved but not displayed, how (if even) can this be monitored?

I swear I was just thinking of this today as the next step in this shitshow

I don't get how they want make those attesters trustworthy. Any attester is installed on a user device, so its "private" key used for verdict signing can be retrieved by a bot author and used to make fake verdicts. Disregarding ethics of the proposal, it just won't work in real world.

I will personally stay on the internet instead of what essentially amounts to google intranet.

Found this lol

This shouldn't be allowed no matter what

As they say, it's for your security and convenience! Honestly!

spoiler

/s

lol as the "adblocking addicts" quality shitpost. Even bigger lol at Google's dipshittery for even thinking this was a remotely good idea in the first place.

Well, I guess I'll stop using the internet. F

I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn't put into cramming ever more ads into people's eyeballs.

It was called Flash, Shockwave, and silverlight. They all met the same fate

At least Flash had cool videogames

Theoretically?

https://ruffle.rs/

Not comparable at all

This makes me so damn angry! This would even make all forks of Firefox unusable.

STOP INVENTING THINGS .... Saniz Silverstone 22

And there it is: the Halloween Documents, 2nd Edition. Here we go again.

Since that’s just a GitHub repo, can anyone explain the tech behind this?

Is this a pilot? Proof of concept? Who would use it? Has there been press about it? What’s the context?

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/1053698- case develops.

The interesting thing is this basically happened already, a while ago. WebASM exists.

So what's different here?

Is that something that would be solved by Pihole? Or would that just break the webpages?

This post title is misleading.

They aren't proposing a way for browsers to DRM page contents and prevent modifications from extensions. This proposal is for an API that allows for details of the browser environment to be shared and cryptographically verified. Think of it like how Android apps have a framework to check that a device is not rooted, except it will also tell you more details like what flavor of OS is being used.

Is it a pointless proposal that will hurt the open web more than it will help? Yes.

Could it be used to enforce DRM? Also, yes. A server could refuse to provide protected content to unverified browsers or browsers running under an environment they don't trust (e.g. Linux).

Does it aim to destroy extensions and adblockers? No.
Straight from the page itself:

Non-goals:

...

  • Enforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions.

Edit: To elaborate on the consequences of the proposal...

Could it be used to prevent ad blocking? Yes. There are two hypothetical ways this could hurt adblock extensions:

  1. As part of the browser "environment" data, the browser could opt to send details about whether built-in ad-block is enabled, any ad-block extensions are enabled, or even if there are any extensions installed at all.

Knowing this data and trusting it's not fake, a website could choose to refuse to serve contents to browsers that have extensions or ad blocking software.

  1. This could lead to a walled-garden web. Browsers that don't support the standard, or minority usage browsers could be prevented from accessing content.

Websites could then require that users visit from a browser that doesn't support adblock extensions.

I'm not saying the proposal is harmless and should be implemented. It has consequences that will hurt both users and adblockers, but it shouldn't be sensationalized to "Google wants to add DRM to web pages".

Edit 2: Most of the recent feedback on the GitHub issues seems to be lacking in feedback on the proposal itself, but here's some good ones that bring up excellent concerns:

If this is about blocking ads, how will this stop people using DNS based ad blocking? Been using control d for awhile and it's been great. Use their DNS on my router and every device in my house is ad free.

Won't work if ads are served on the same domain name as YouTube does. Also I think the website just wouldn't load if you block the domain checking the integrity (which will probably be done on the same domain as the website you attempt to access)

Twst

web env. integrity is not as bad as people make it out to be.
yeah I absolutely agree that it's terrible and also a bad idea (we don't need MORE drm in our browsers, I'm looking at you, Widevine (although firefox worked around it by running drm in an isolated container)), but it's main purpose is to detect automated requests and effectively block web scraping with a drm system (it ensures two things: your useragent can be trusted and you're a real non-automated user), NOT detect ad blockers. It doesn't prevent web pages from being modified like some people are saying.
there's a lot of misleading information about the api as it doesn't "verify integrity" of the web page/DOM itself.

it works by creating a token that a server can verify, for example when a user creates a new post. If the token is invalid, server may reject your attempt to do an action you're trying to perform. (this will probably just lead to a forced captcha in browsers that don't support it...)

Also, here's a solution: Just don't use Chrome or any Chromium-based browsers.

Pi holes could still circumvent this, no? At a high level you'd need a computer to load a page, strip all the garbage, and forward the remaining page to the client. Any drm keys could be retained I would expect?

I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn't put into cramming ever more ads into people's eyeballs.

Lets break the near monopoly they have and give what google wants the finger.

https://duckduckgo.com/windows

You know how nearly every browser is now based on chromium? And firefox when its not chromium, and even forefox adopted the extension limitations of chrome? Well I hear Duckduckgo's new browser something new finally instead of based off an existing browser.

It doesn't have extensions yet but those are coming and adblock is baked in.

Ed: my 1st downvotes of my time on the fediverse. <3 you to folks.

you misunderstood it tbh.
it's supposed to be used as a way to skip bot verification if the requests are signed by a drm system which includes your unique id (coming from google account or google play id), and one of the goals of the actual proposal is keeping existing extension working AND keeping web pages working without drm.
of course i don't want any drm in my browser, but it's kinda already there anyway...
it will likely make the experience worse for non-drm users because they will get hit by more advanced and sensitive bot verification systems or rate limits which is kinda bad but not the end of the world.
y'all are just overreacting and spreading pure bullshit.
it's not even supposed to be used to verify DOM elements, just that the user is using an official Chrome/Chromium browser, and is not automated.
basically it's just SafetyNet.
it will not kill js addons.

If you don't want to see ads, pay for the services or use services that do not force you to download unwanted data (ads) on your computer. It's that simple.

I'm amazed at how angry people are at ads. I agree that this change would be terrible purely because of the customization thing, but people at some point are going to have to realise that there is no such thing as free lunch. You're using their service/web site, they say you have to pay by watching ads and thats the deal you have. If you don't like it, don't use it, because if ads weren't a thing, the whole internet would be paywalled (apart from the sites people host from their own cash/donations). The internet and big tech has for so long taken the stance to grow fast make money later, but many never do. I feel like the time of reckoning is soon upon a large part of the internet, where if they don't make money, they'll vanish.

Edit: just so I clear it up before anybody starts yelling at me about it, I am very much against this change for multiple reasons, but it's just that it triggered me to see so many people attacking the wrong thing. We've just become spoiled by unsustainable startup practices and have lost touch with reality.