Yes, this Ars writer is serious. These are basically the arguments that
Berners-Lee and the other people supporting this within the W3C are making.
"Frankly, I don't think the article is "wrong" per se in stating that it
would be a defeat for the open web if it was abandoned in favour of
DRM-compatible "walled gardens" becoming almost ubiquitous, nor in saying
that failing to adopt DRM as a web standard would likely lead to this."
I agree with the first part of this, but the second is just scaremongering,
because there's just no reason to think it would happen. I've written about
this on my blog:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2015/09/07/mozilla-sells-out-firefox-users-for-market-share/
Firstly, There have always been popular content delivery networks that are
not the web; radio, TV, CD/DVD/BluRay, game consoles, Napster, BitTorrent
etc. The web is not fundamentally in competition with these. In fact, sharing
information about the content delivered over these other platforms is one of
the things that has driven the growth of the web (artist homepages, fan
sites, IMDB, Discogs etc etc). DRM-crippled content delivered over the
internet using software other than the browser is no threat to the usefulness
of the web.
Second, the proliferation of platform-specific apps would create huge extra
costs for the companies maintaining them, compared to maintaining one
mobile-friendly HTML5 website. That's precisely why they are trying to push
crippleware into HTML; to save themselves money. In contrast to what the Ars
writer claims, keeping crippleware out of the browser is more likely to force
the media gatekeepers to consider "unprotected" (ie copy friendly)
distribution.
Since all the major browser vendors have already built in the EME crippleware
unit, it doesn't really matter from a practical perspective whether its in
the official HTML spec or not. But it remains symbolically important that the
W3C doesn't formally endorse a standard that can't be implemented in free
code software. Amongst other things, it means the DRM-promoters can't accuse
free browsers that don't implement EME of not properly supporting the HTML5
standard.
