> If the platforms all made it so that you have to solder a new chip into your phone before you can play DRM content, there would be a lot less DRM.
I mean, yes, but why would they do that?
> Wouldn't that create a huge market opportunity for new DRM-free studios, who would then out-compete the traditional ones by being available on all platforms instead of only on Insecure Expensive Proprietary Slow Cableco Platform Nobody Likes?
You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it.
Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy.
So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations.
> You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it.
Except that it is fungible, it's just not universally fungible.
The reason Winter Dragon isn't fungible with Game of Thrones is that you don't like it as much. You'd rather watch Game of Thrones. But there are thousands of shows, and out of those there are hundreds you might want to watch, yet there is only time to watch dozens or fewer.
Nobody can actually watch all of the shows they might want to watch. Letting "lack of DRM" be the thing that chooses between the ones of equal desirability to you is as good a way of pruning the list as any.
> Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy.
Who says it has to be someone without connections to the existing industry? New independent studios form all the time as existing talent strikes out on their own. All it takes is for one of them to prove the market before everybody is doing it.
> So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations.
What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS?
One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it.
Plugins like Flash, which are the historic answer for DRM on the web, have a huge surface space and can interact in the browser in all kinds of odd ways. These EME modules are much smaller, they are much less powerful (AFAIK they either return a frame to the browser to composite or directly to the OS compositor, so you don't need to worry about how they change layout and then change layout again as you reflow), and as a result of that can be put in stricter sandboxes. That's a clear win from a browser security and stability point-of-view, which is a concrete benefit for browser vendors in making it viable to drop Flash (and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash).
> Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it.
They still sandbox it because from the user's perspective it's still an unauditable black box, so at least the user can verify the sandbox. But that doesn't actually solve the problem, because the black box code is interacting with black box hardware. If there is a bug, you've done the opposite of sandboxing it -- you've prevented it from being traced and given it direct access to hardware.
> and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash
The solution to Flash should have been to have someone reverse engineer it and publish a 100% open source implementation, including the DRM. Then let them keep publishing using Flash format as long as they like, but no more black box.
> What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS?
These companies make Xbox, Chromecast/Stadia, Apple TV, etc. Things that could plausibly be a media center, given some latitude and open standards. You could upload your movie collection onto it, give it your streaming account credentials and it gives you a single interface to all your media.
DRM kills that. You can't make an interface that allows the user to watch a Disney movie they've paid for and then have it show the YouTube commentary on it. You can't have something that recommends Orange Is The New Black after you watch The Wire because one is Netflix and the other is HBO.
Because DRM allows the studios to assert rights that copyright doesn't give them. That's all it does -- that's why they want it. It clearly doesn't prevent piracy.
> One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
The problem with this is that it can't simultaneously have such low privileges that it can't do anything harmful even if totally compromised by malicious actors, while also having such high privileges that it's immune to interference by even the owner of the system with physical access to it. They're diametrically opposed objectives. And the second one systematically fails regardless, but having to pretend that that isn't the case compromises the ability to do the first.
I mean, yes, but why would they do that?
> Wouldn't that create a huge market opportunity for new DRM-free studios, who would then out-compete the traditional ones by being available on all platforms instead of only on Insecure Expensive Proprietary Slow Cableco Platform Nobody Likes?
You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it.
Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy.