Between government shutdowns, Syrian chemical weapons, and NSA domestic spying, it’s easy to see why the W3C changes to web standards hasn’t hit many radars. It isn’t exactly the type of news that takes a sentence to understand. In essence, it means that your browser can not only keep you from doing certain things, it doesn’t have to tell you it’s doing it, either. Are you paying attention now?
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.