They are still going to pursue it, just under a different name and rolling-out timeline. What they changed is only the way they are announcing it publicly.
It’s going to be “DRM for the Web, but with extra steps”.
Lets call it what it is, googles attempt to create a situation in which they can ban all competition and establish a global monopoly.
I partially agree. They created a monopoly because they offer the best search engine service. You can’t be accused of making a monopoly if your competition is embarrassingly bad and no one wants to use any service but yours.
What they are doing now, regardless of how they gained this monopoly, is ensuring that every cow that feeds on the grass of their field yields profitable milk.
But if you implement something in your browser that allows websites to block anything that isn’t an accepted browser (and websites use it because they don’t want their precious data to feed random AIs) you effectively prevent any potential competition from crawling websites to build a search index that might threaten your position.
Google temporarily delays rollout of their DRM for Web until public attention shifts to something worse they propose that was always a smokescreen.
“The company [Google] claimed that this new API would help combat online fraud and abuse, and that it would do so in a privacy-friendly manner.”
Lied. The word is lied.
The price for privacy and freedom? Eternal Vigilance.
Google will try and try again, so stay watchful everyone.
They will try it again in like two to three years from now. This time they will just do a under the radar and somewhat diluted version of it.
I mean, it was under the radar to begin with. It wasn’t on any main google channels, it was mostly only discussed by the developers who handled the project.
The only reason people know about this to begin with is because there were fortunately a lot of people paying attention. I remember the first time I saw anything about it was on HackerNews and it was straight from the dev. Maybe it was even just the github. Either way, it was not advertised in any major way other than not outright being hidden.
When it originally hit, I remember arguments about how its “just a few developers,” and “we’ll wait until it actually ends up in chrome” and so on. The whole point was that it was still relatively early on in development and was just at proposal stage. This thankfully went from obscure developer news to big worldwide general tech news and Google backed down… for now.
We can be thankful developers with consciences are paying attention, in the meantime.
These, if I am correct, were the original links on HackerNews from around 4 months ago. Not exactly major advertising blitz from Google or anything, mostly wonky/technical documents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999 / https://chromestatus.com/feature/5796524191121408
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 / https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity
