EFF has repeatedly raised the issue of new browsers and EME, on-list, in calls and during the earlier covenant process. We reiterate these concerns, first published here (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present) as a formal objection:
The W3C has always stood for the ability of anyone to make a browser. By following the recommendations of the W3C, new companies and projects can make a browser that can view all the standards-compliant documents and files on the entire World Wide Web. While there are only a few major browsers in use today, they include several of relatively recent vintage, and are vastly outnumbered by all the browsers that have come and gone since the first days of the Web.
The Web's future depends on new browsers coming into existence to replace the ones that will inevitably fade away.
Any new browser coming on the scene after the standardization of EME will enter a fundamentally different world than all the ones that have come before: for that browser to receive and display content that is defined by the W3C, it will have to enter into a commercial partnership with one of a handful of companies that have been blessed as being entitled to produce a CDM.
A browser that can't strike such a partnership -- either because all possible partners are in exclusive relationships with existing browsers, or because it lacks the commercial or structural ability to enter into a commercial partnership (say, because it is a community-based free software project) will be frozen out of rendering part of the standards-defined Web.
It would be a return to the bad old days of websites that advised that they were "Best viewed with Netscape" or "Best viewed with Internet Explorer," because the new browsers would be locked out of some of their content.
However, if there is a covenant protecting interoperability, new browsers can bypass the refusal to deal from incumbent manufacturers and make their own EME-CDM combination that can play all the content that meets the W3C's standards.
EFF has repeatedly raised the issue of new browsers and EME, on-list, in calls and during the earlier covenant process. We reiterate these concerns, first published here (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present) as a formal objection:
The W3C has always stood for the ability of anyone to make a browser. By following the recommendations of the W3C, new companies and projects can make a browser that can view all the standards-compliant documents and files on the entire World Wide Web. While there are only a few major browsers in use today, they include several of relatively recent vintage, and are vastly outnumbered by all the browsers that have come and gone since the first days of the Web.
The Web's future depends on new browsers coming into existence to replace the ones that will inevitably fade away.
Any new browser coming on the scene after the standardization of EME will enter a fundamentally different world than all the ones that have come before: for that browser to receive and display content that is defined by the W3C, it will have to enter into a commercial partnership with one of a handful of companies that have been blessed as being entitled to produce a CDM.
A browser that can't strike such a partnership -- either because all possible partners are in exclusive relationships with existing browsers, or because it lacks the commercial or structural ability to enter into a commercial partnership (say, because it is a community-based free software project) will be frozen out of rendering part of the standards-defined Web.
It would be a return to the bad old days of websites that advised that they were "Best viewed with Netscape" or "Best viewed with Internet Explorer," because the new browsers would be locked out of some of their content.
However, if there is a covenant protecting interoperability, new browsers can bypass the refusal to deal from incumbent manufacturers and make their own EME-CDM combination that can play all the content that meets the W3C's standards.