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snek

It's pretty much all the paid media on the internet. Spotify, Hulu, netflix, cable providers, amazon, etc.

I guess if you literally only watch free YouTube videos it's not a problem? Totally not an anti-trust issue...

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Is Spotify, or Hulu, or Netflix, or any of the others you mentioned owned by Google? No.

So... why would it cause any antitrust violation?

Widevine was not the first DRM for videos, it was already common practice for the big paid video websites to require DRM before it was created.

Imagine we're 20 years into the future and Ford has just successfully managed to lobby (with quite some industry support, mind you) for mandatory Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure comms, where every car has to be able to talk to every set of traffic lights, speed sign, and other vehicle.

Now imagine that the V2X standard which just got enshrined in law states that every vehicle has to be compatible with every other vehicle etc. And Ford sat down with GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai, and offered them a proprietary component which just so happens to do all this V2X stuff without any hassle. And they all agree to use it.

It only be legally built by Ford, but they're the V2X experts so that's OK, right, I mean they're doing a public service, right? Ford is pretty happy selling this component to GM, Toyota, Honda, etc. for a very reasonable fee, so how can there be an issue?

Now imagine some new car company wants to build cars which compete with Ford's cars, and Ford says 'nope, you can't buy our V2X component.' And booyah, Ford now controls who can and can't enter the market.

Hmm.

> Imagine we're 20 years into the future and Ford has just successfully managed to lobby (with quite some industry support, mind you) for mandatory Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure comms, where every car has to be able to talk to every set of traffic lights, speed sign, and other vehicle.

Right, but this is where the analogy breaks down. Its more like "some municipalities decided that cars on their streets had to be specially registered or they wouldn't let you drive. Some people like those municipalities, but they aren't the majority, and you aren't, at all, forced to go near them.

OK, then how about instead of it being a national legal requirement, 90% of roads were privately owned toll roads and Ford convinced a consortium of toll road owners to standardize on their V2X component. So you can build a car without it but that car can't drive to anywhere you want to go.

But again, that still doesn't work, because it's not 90% of toll roads. Like, keep in mind, in this analogy, Ford owns a bunch of roads, and they're all free to travel on. And of course there's also Honda (Microsoft: PlayRead) and BMW (Apple: FairPlay) with their own exclusive components that serve the same purpose, and some municipalities choose to use those instead, or to allow vehicles that use any. Or, most of the municipalities (in concrete terms, the vast majority), don't pass any laws at all.

For your analogy to make sense, the following would need to be true:

1. Apple and Microsoft didn't have competing (and fairly widely used) alternate DRM solutions

2. The average website required DRM to access it.

Without those, this is nothing more than dystopian fanfiction.

I guess the questions are whether:

1. copyright owners forced Google to implement DRM

2. Or, Google welcomed DRM (with the intention of lock-in)

3. Or, Google should have kept Chrome DRM free and fought the copyright owners...

I don’t think those questions matter at all. Regardless of how the current situation arose, it enables strong lock-in to Chrome vs. Chromium.

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