internet.com

Opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of MRD.

On September 18th, The EFF wrote "An open letter to the W3C Director, CEO, team and membership" to tender their resignation from the W3C, and express reasons for doing so.

After careful review of the letter, related publications, and recent events, an official response is imperative - HOLY CRAP!!!

Like just about everything on the Internet, most users have no idea what's going on behind the scenes, within the technology, and the implications for us all. I would never claim to know all about these myself, but understand the EFF's resignation stems from DRM (digital rights media) and how the EME (encrypted media extensions) specification to be adopted by the W3C as an HTML5 standard would allow corporations to impose their own 3rd-party technology onto user's via browsers. Further deincentivising corporate innovation and possibly giving corporations a legal foothold to charge legitimate security researchers, who make the Internet more secure for us all, with the already very controversial CFAA. And in so doing, seemingly undermining the whole open Internet ethos itself!

It's imperative to support media creation or it won't even be around for us, and thank God .com is a PART of the Internet. But they are NOT the whole Internet. EME seems some further expression of super sour grapes from corporations after having done too little too late to leverage the Internet with innovation for their own customers to consume media, and has no place on an "open Internet".

Besides, how are you going to control 0s and 1s anyway. I mean, once any media is decrypted, it can be copied into any format to anywhere anyway. EME ain't even gonna work people.

It's clearly understandable from where the EFF are coming and where I stand on this. But perhaps their reasons for resigning are the very reasons they should remain in the W3C. We clearly need them there, now more than ever.