Three years after the W3C approved a DRM standard, it's no longer possible to make a functional indie browser

Back in 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approved the most controversial standard in its long history: Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME, which enabled Netflix and other big media companies to use DRM despite changes to browsers extensions that eliminated the kinds of deep hooks that DRM requires.

At the time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that, by approving its first non-unanimous standard, the W3C would give control over browser design to the big browser companies, and two years later, that warning has fully proven out.

First, Google -- whose proprietary technology must be licensed in most cases if you want to make a new browser -- stopped permitting open source browsers to use its DRM technology, effectively requiring all new browsers to be proprietary.

Now, Microsoft and Apple -- the remaining two vendors who can also supply the proprietary components that Google won't license -- have effectively stopped answering the phone when small browser creators call. Microsoft might let you license its tools if you pay them $10,000 to submit an application and then $0.35 for every browser you ship.

Samuel Maddock has been trying to create a rival "indie" browser, and has been to each of the EME DRM vendors and has been sent away by all of them.

The W3C's mission is to create an Open Web Platform" so that "everyone has the right to implement a software component of the Web without requiring any approvals or waiving license fees." When EME was approved, we warned that they were effectively ending the Open Web era by putting every future browser developer at the mercy of three giant incumbent browser developers. Read the rest