It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.

I've always been a proponent of unifying the internet under a single platform, be it Blink or Gecko I don't really care. Chromium itself was built on FOSS technology, and has its roots in KHTML, which Apple later adopted as WebKit, and Google used and made Blink.

The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn't get the final say.

It's such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.

But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don't even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.

This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn't legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they'll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn't monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.

For what it’s worth, this comment just inspired me to switch my work PC from edge to Firefox. Was already using it in Linux, and will switch my home PC tonight.

Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don't really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.

Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet's favorite content hub

Ironically I don’t think it would take foot. Many average users I know of use adBlockers - albeit shitty ones - and I don’t think companies would be willing to risk it

It's time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.

Everyone talks about this like it wouldn't open a massive attack surface for the mother of DDOS.

Make the attestor slow or take it out, you take down large parts of their business. I don't know, i wouldn't put too much stake in a platform/website that could be taken out so completely.

What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.