Comment by jchw

> If Netflix doesn't work in the browser users aren't going to lean back in their chairs and think fondly of the freedom fighter jchw that protected them from working against their own interests, they are going to open Edge and watch Netflix.

Or maybe (hopefully) they download popcorn time instead

Yes... that's pretty much exactly what I said. Users will indeed just do what they need to do to watch Netflix, whether or not DRM is good for them or the web platform.

> Secondly, users don't really get a choice. Users are fucked because browsers implement features like DRM and websites hard-depend on them. So the user is no longer choosing whether or not to enable DRM, but whether or not they can watch Netflix on their laptop. User agents should not put users in predicaments like this where they are forced to make choices against their own interests. This is one of those situations where nuance is necessary.

That's why it shouldn't be a part of the web platform in the first place. Because we shouldn't force users to make choices against their own interests.

Here are some other examples of where we shouldn't force users to make choices against their own interests:

- Users should not have to give up their rights to be able to access legally-mandated warranty services or replacement parts.

- Users should not be forced to accept being tracked.

- Users should not be forced to forfeit their right to be a part of a class action lawsuit to use a product or service.

Try as you might, you're never going to convince anyone that the free market will just magically make all of the incentives align and make "the right choice", these are things that ultimately have to be solved with policy. The closest thing to "policy" on the web is standards, and W3C put EME in the standards despite widespread outcry, and that's why we're at where we're at.

Now the thing is, we have DRM in browsers, but we still don't have Web Environment Integrity, a complete and utter bastardization of the open web that would've made it cryptographically impossible for an open source browser to really meaningfully exist (since compiling it yourself would likely make it impossible for you to e.g. do banking or watch Twitch streams, since it would then fail attestation.) The reason we don't have WEI is because it was widely rejected by the community. Not because users made a choice.

It's nice to think that you can just leave it to the users to pick and they'll always do the right thing, but at the end of the day most people don't have time to care about DRM or WEI. Most people are not technical and just simply don't have the capacity in their day to be concerned about things like that. That's why it's literally the job of people who do have that capacity to fight for the user's best interests and try to avoid users being put into positions where they are basically guaranteed to be fucked.

And frankly, we're not winning the fight.

(This is no different from anything else. The vast majority of people can't be expected to fight for e.g. free speech rights either; it's always going to be a minority of people who hold the line.)