Hi List,
Looking at the enormous list of members in the WC3 along with the
fact that application membership is subject to final arbitrary approval
by the current WC3, I'm concerned about the lack of democratic checks on
their decision making.
Example with Encrypted Media Extensions draft:
Here's a Free Software Foundation page briefly describing the problem
and stating that 28,000 people signed on that they want to reject
Encrypted Media Extensions as a web standard:
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5
Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's formal objection to the HTML
Working Group Charter that explains the problem in detail:
https://www.eff.org/pages/drm/w3c-formal-objection-html-wg
And, perhaps most revealingly, here's a blog entry about "perspectives"
on the issue from Jeffrey Jaffe, former CTO of Novell and current CEO of
the WC3:
http://www.w3.org/QA/2013/05/perspectives_on_encrypted_medi.html
The comments to that blog are instructive, not just because they
overwhelmingly make articulate arguments against the inclusion of EME
into WC3 standards, but because every single reply by Jaffe is
predicated upon the premise that the Working Group Charter refered to by
the EFF has already been decided and is clearly not part of the debate.
(Notice for example how many of his responses simply turn the question
back to the commenter asking them what their proposal is to support
playback of "protected content" over the web.)
Whether you agree with me (and 28,000 who signed the FSF's petition) or
not, there is clearly a problem of public accountability with a public
standards body here. Unlike the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign, there are no
politicians worried about reelection who can be called and emailed.
It's a small staff supported by member companies who obviously want to
see DRM standardized into the browser-- otherwise that wording wouldn't
have found its way into the charter.
Are there actions planned further than what the EFF and FSF have already
taken? I know this is a "tech" list, but the problem of how standards
get formed isn't going to go away any time soon, and there should be a
sustainable way to ensure that the WC3 is responsive to the users and
not just its funders.
-Jonathan
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