Definitely time to make our own internet, with hookers and blow.

Geez this would suck but as with other drm I’m sure the de-drm plug-in would follow

This is just terrible.

However, while it does add a layer of annoyance that'll mess things up for most, like any DRM, it fundamentally is unsound and will get cracked. Us good people have a big incentive to do so here. Reading the spec, it still relies on a trusted party (expected to be the OS) and, unlike ie. games consoles, we already have admin access to that party from the get go.

Where it could be a problem is mobile phones. They could target browsers that support ad blocking and you'd probably need to root the phone to get past that.

Greed kills everything good

I doubt it's the engineers.

I remember watching Chrome fill up long lists of ??? in the task manager, back when I still used Windows and Chrome on an old Laptop. Both CPU and RAM were working at their utmost and that shit blocked everything.

This post title is misleading.

They aren't proposing a way for browsers to DRM page contents and prevent modifications from extensions. This proposal is for an API that allows for details of the browser environment to be shared and cryptographically verified. Think of it like how Android apps have a framework to check that a device is not rooted, except it will also tell you more details like what flavor of OS is being used.

Is it a pointless proposal that will hurt the open web more than it will help? Yes.

Could it be used to enforce DRM? Also, yes. A server could refuse to provide protected content to unverified browsers or browsers running under an environment they don't trust (e.g. Linux).

Does it aim to destroy extensions and adblockers? No.
Straight from the page itself:

Non-goals:

...

• Enforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions.

Edit: To elaborate on the consequences of the proposal...

Could it be used to prevent ad blocking? Yes. There are two hypothetical ways this could hurt adblock extensions:

1. As part of the browser "environment" data, the browser could opt to send details about whether built-in ad-block is enabled, any ad-block extensions are enabled, or even if there are any extensions installed at all.

Knowing this data and trusting it's not fake, a website could choose to refuse to serve contents to browsers that have extensions or ad blocking software.

2. This could lead to a walled-garden web. Browsers that don't support the standard, or minority usage browsers could be prevented from accessing content.

Websites could then require that users visit from a browser that doesn't support adblock extensions.

I'm not saying the proposal is harmless and should be implemented. It has consequences that will hurt both users and adblockers, but it shouldn't be sensationalized to "Google wants to add DRM to web pages".

Edit 2: Most of the recent feedback on the GitHub issues seems to be lacking in feedback on the proposal itself, but here's some good ones that bring up excellent concerns:

• Browsers developed and distributed by large tech firms have a conflict of interest with holding back or limiting attestation. Attestation enables the web to be restricted in a way that benefits tech firms. For example, Office 365 could require that it is used only on Windows and/or only through Edge.

• Similarly to what I brought up, having the ability for websites to trust a (browser, os) tuple could allow for certain browsers to be preferred, simply because they do not support extensions.

• How it will create hostile discrimination, and two-tiered services based on whether browsers are attested or not.

• The proposal does not do an adequate job explaining how a browser may be attested to.. Would this require something like Secure Boot in order for a browser to be attested to? That would discriminate against users with outdated hardware lacking support for boot integrity, or users who don't have it enabled for some reason or another.

I find it hard to see how they could protect content from ad blockers without also crippling pages that self modify their own content. Perhaps they could put headers akin to content security policy that forbids external modification. Assuming a browser were to honour that header I could see bad publicity and a lot of people just moving to another browser which doesn't. Additionally, ad blockers aren't the only things that modify pages - breaking accessibility add ons could be more negative publicity (just like with Reddit).

I think browsers would be best off to let websites develop countermeasures if they're so sore about ad blockers. Perhaps they could use "self healing" Javascript libraries that put back content which is removed. Or they could just refuse to work if they detect an ad blocker, e.g. they stick some canaries in the DOM or along blocked paths to see if an ad blocker is present.

Also fun to read this (by Google employee): https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_like/ I literally snacked popcorn.

Is these a real google plan, or just an engineer proposal on github?

Well time learn how to jailbreak web pages now too

Web 3.0 - users, kindly go fuck yourselves p.s. pay us subscription money and view lots of ads

This has to be seen in context of AI - Google will offer this to companies to ‘protect their pages from being scraped’

I ditched Chrome about a year ago for Edge and just recently switched to Firefox, shouldn't really be concerning as long as there are alternatives.