Everything is terrible.Here's the bad news: the World Wide Web Consortium is going ahead with its plan to add DRM to HTML5, setting the stage for browsers that are designed to disobey their owners and to keep secrets from them so they can't be forced to do as they're told. Here's the (much) worse news: the decision to go forward with the project of standardizing DRM for the Web came from Tim Berners-Lee himself, who seems to have bought into the lie that Hollywood will abandon the Web and move somewhere else (AOL?) if they don't get to redesign the open Internet to suit their latest profit-maximization scheme.
Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the wrangle at the W3C and predicts that, now that it's kosher to contemplate locking up browsers against their owners, we'll see every kind of control-freakery come out of the woodwork, from flags that prevent "View Source" to restricting embedded fonts to preventing image downloading to Javascript that you can't save and run offline. Indeed, some of this stuff is already underway at W3C, spurred into existence by a huge shift in the Web from open platform to a place where DRM-hobbled browsers are "in-scope" for the WC3.
