Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

None of what you suggest has any impact, and your model of how many people it takes to influence a Senator is frankly delusional. A max donation to a campaign will get you a signed thank-you card if you're lucky.

Policy on stuff like tech is set by staffers, most of whom work from material helpfully pre-drafted for them by lobbyists. There are some legislators (like Wyden of Oregon) who have very good in-house people on tech policy, while others have no expertise and have to rely on outside parties. But the idea that anyone can be bought for a donation is heartbreakingly naive (and fortunately false). Large donations at best get your calls answered by the junior staffer whose job it is to protect the Senator/Congressman from ever having to talk to people like you directly.

Major legislation on tech is rare, and it's generally much easier to kill something you don't like than to get a provision put into it. The latter course requires being deeply plugged in to the people drafting policy (again, mid-level staff on the Hill, who have zero awareness or interest in which private individuals are making campaign contributions) and enough clout and political ability to shepherd your desired policy through the full sausage-making apparatus of Congress.

Look at the current dueling bills on crypto for an example of how the process actually works. None of it is driven by strongly-worded letters from constituents.

Just like how Firefox earns money, sell default search engine rights to highest bidder (google, bing) etc , Chrome itself can become billions of dollar business.

to any Google engineers who read this message. if you have any love for open and free web, you can either get out of Google or change it from within. but let's face it, you are impotent if you want to do the latter.

Authoritarianism is always creeping in. Its a force or evil that just never stops.

> it's clear that they are being careful and are upfront about the some potential misuses and the proposed handing of them.

On the contrary, my main issue is that they identify one of the primary issues and fail to address it.

The biggest issue is that web designers will design around WEI such that the web is unusable without it. For example, while the current use case might be “captcha without WEI, no captcha with WEI”, a future use case might be “captcha with WEI, 401 without WEI”

Essentially this means an end to the open web: websites block you if you aren’t attested. If you want to browse from NewOS, tough cookies that’s not recognized by attesters

This is addressed in the proposal in “Open Questions > How will we prevent this signal from being used to exclude vendors”.

The only proposed solution is in section “Holdback”:

“[…] we are evaluating whether attestation signals must sometimes be held back for a meaningful number of requests […] Such a holdback would encourage web developers to use signals for aggregate analysis and opportunistic reduction of friction, as opposed to a quasi-allowlist […]”

This is a massive potential issue. The author acknowledges WEI could become an allowlist for the web. The author implicitly acknowledges this is most likely if most clients are using WEI (hence, the proposed solution of artificially decreasing WEI usage via holdback)

And even then, the proposed solution of holdback is not a solid one. There’s no technical reason that WEI will continue to have holdback in the future, at best maybe a google pinky promise. Further, there’s solid game theoretic reasons we can predict that holdback may vanish: if popular sites start using WEI as an allowlist, then any browser with holdback will have a degraded browsing experience on a percentage of visits. You can win market share by abandoning holdback!

As a tragedy of the commons, we can reasonably assume in the long term WEI is supported on all visits by all major browsers and a nontrivial number of websites use it as an allowlist.

In conclusion: the author admits WEI breaks the open web with sufficient market share, but the only proposed solution seems guaranteed to fail in a competitive browser marketplace based on game theory.