By Nelson Schneider - 07/23/23 at 01:26 AM CT
Back in the Spring of the Plague Year 2020, I warned of major players in the corporate Games Industry attempting to smuggle Digital Rights Management schemes – a.k.a., DRM – into our modern games under the guise of ‘protecting’ law-abiding players from evil, filthy hackers and cheaters. Unfortunately, there was no line drawn in the sand by the gaming community, what with the confluence of a global pandemic, race riots, and the start of a new presidential administration.
Now, there’s an even worse ‘DRM as protection’ scheme on the horizon. It’s being pushed by none other than the aging search/advertising giant, Google, and its target is the ENTIRE Internet.
Web 3.0 has been in the planning and speculation stages for quite a few years now, and the brief explosion of blockchain technology revolving around cryptocurrencies lead tech journalism to the belief that Web 3.0 would provide each individual user with significantly greater privacy, security, and control over our own data, thanks to power of computers guessing numbers at each other. Recently, however, Google has released their so-called Manifest v3, which alleges to serve as the company’s roadmap for Web 3.0. Instead of a secure and private wonderland, bringing peace of mind to online denizens across the entire world, Google’s primary goal with Manifest v3 seems to be applying a DRM environment to the entire Internet, all for the sake of preserving their framework for serving ads and kicking adblockers to the curb.
Youtuber, Louis Rossman, goes into great detail on this subject, and has been paying far closer attention to it than I have, and his assessment of Google’s endgame here is chilling.
Fortunately, Google only has a near-monopoly on Internet usage via their crappy Chrome browser, with de-Google’d Chrome variants like Vivaldi publicly stating their commitment to adblocking in the Manifest v3 era, and non-Chromium browsers like Firefox, which are still hanging in there with single-digit browser marketshare.
I really don’t understand why people still like Google products in the 2020s. The company’s search engine hasn’t been particularly good, or better in any way, than the privacy-centric DuckDuckGo engine (which I’ve been using for at least a decade at this point) or even Microsoft’s Bing, which was considered a complete flop from a marketshare perspective, until the company shoehorned AI Chatbot functionality into it. Likewise, I never particularly liked Chrome. The whole “Chrome is faster!” argument never meant much to me when it was relevant, as my unstable 512Kbps DLS connection at the time didn’t allow me to experience the nanoseconds of rendering performance Chrome had over Firefox, and all of the extra Google processes pinging various servers in the background actually made my experience with Chrome feel slower. Then there’s Youtube, which is a hellhole of Orwellian censorship.
If people can rally behind the cause of boycotting crappy beer or a movie based on a tabletop RPG, it’s obvious that humanity has the will to push back against terrible ideas en masse. The problem with building resistance to Google’s terrible Manifest v3 Web 3.0 proposals, however, is the fact that the entire exercise is almost entirely invisible. The mainstream media doesn’t cover it. Even the dedicated tech media is fairly limited in scope, meaning that it took an independent journalist on Youtube to call out Youtube’s parent company – a precarious situation to hold! Regular, everyday people don’t know what Google and the tech players in the Games Industry are up to, and that’s the plan. By replacing the entire substrate of the Internet with their DRM platform, Google will make it impossible to reverse once it’s in-place. If we, the users, don’t make a fuss now, we won’t have the option later on.
