Alright, I'm going to use an analogy that's a bit thin, but just stick with me on it.
Imagine some private organizations decided it would be safer if everyone that came to their establishment had a fully loaded gun with their specified ammunition requirements (I know this is a ridiculous presumption, but just suspend disbelief for a second). So say a bunch of businesses like gas stations and restaurants implement this policy.
If you are anti-gun or a pacifist, you can just avoid those establishments. But what if the practice became wide spread enough that a state or the federal government decided to mandate that everyone had to own a gun. They didn't need to buy ammunition or ever use it, but they had to have the gun.
Obviously that would piss off a lot of ideologues who are vehemently opposed to guns and violence. You can pragmatically say, "Well if you're against it, then just don't use it. I mean the majority of people will use it or won't care." But forcing even the outline of something onto people who are ideologically opposed to it is obviously going to be met with resistance.
So I know that analogy isn't all that great, but I think the principle is mostly the same. This standard is forcing the outline of DRM to be enabled on everyone's browser (since pretty much every major or usable browser is going to implement it). Yea, you can never go to a web site or download a specific DRM component. But you're still forced to have the "unloaded gun" of DRM.
I'm not personally that much of an ideologue, so I don't think it's that big of a deal. But there's a pretty strong contingent that is ideologically opposed to all forms of DRM. It's not that hard to see why they are upset about the standard if you try to look at it from that point of view.
the analogy is that you can use 99.9% of the web _now_.
Since "everyone has DRM anyway", Youtube can implement it too. Then Vimeo or whatever. And you end up having to use a browser with DRM, or looking at a broken WWW.
(think of what disabling javascript means these days)
Imagine some private organizations decided it would be safer if everyone that came to their establishment had a fully loaded gun with their specified ammunition requirements (I know this is a ridiculous presumption, but just suspend disbelief for a second). So say a bunch of businesses like gas stations and restaurants implement this policy.
If you are anti-gun or a pacifist, you can just avoid those establishments. But what if the practice became wide spread enough that a state or the federal government decided to mandate that everyone had to own a gun. They didn't need to buy ammunition or ever use it, but they had to have the gun.
Obviously that would piss off a lot of ideologues who are vehemently opposed to guns and violence. You can pragmatically say, "Well if you're against it, then just don't use it. I mean the majority of people will use it or won't care." But forcing even the outline of something onto people who are ideologically opposed to it is obviously going to be met with resistance.
So I know that analogy isn't all that great, but I think the principle is mostly the same. This standard is forcing the outline of DRM to be enabled on everyone's browser (since pretty much every major or usable browser is going to implement it). Yea, you can never go to a web site or download a specific DRM component. But you're still forced to have the "unloaded gun" of DRM.
I'm not personally that much of an ideologue, so I don't think it's that big of a deal. But there's a pretty strong contingent that is ideologically opposed to all forms of DRM. It's not that hard to see why they are upset about the standard if you try to look at it from that point of view.