Is Web Environment Integrity a risk to the accessibility of the Internet?
Is Web Environment Integrity a risk to the accessibility of the Internet?
Related discussions:
- Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser
- Web Environment Integrity Explainer
Ultimately, this is a clear indication to me that the advertising standard for the Internet is unsustainable. The profit margins with the model were always thin, but at this point, there's barely any profit left. I think that the internet needs to move to a new model of revenue, but I'm not sure exactly how or what that model should be.
Google's first quarter 2023 report shows they made massive profits off vast revenue due to advertising.
It is about control though. The thing that caught my eye is that they're saying that only "approved" browsers will be able to access these WEI sites. So what does that mean for crawlers/scrapers? That the big tech companies on the approval board will be able to lock potential competitors out of accessing the web - new browsers, search engines, etc. but much more importantly... Machine Learning.
Google's biggest fear right now is that ML systems will completely eliminate most people's reason to use Google's search, and therefore their main source of revenue will plummet. And they're right to be scared, it's already starting to happen and it's showing us very quickly just how bad Google's search results are.
So this seems to me like an attempt to control things from that side. It's essentially the "big boys" trying to consolidate and firm-up their hold in the industry and not let newcomers rival them, as with ML the barrier to entry has never been lower.
Google makes a massive amount of profit from operating the ad platform and serving those ads on Google search, as search engines are extremely efficient both at serving ads and running. So I think my statement still somewhat stands, but you're still correct. On Google's part, this is just an attempt to edge out the competition and maintain its share in the oligopoly of major tech companies.
This would be bad, no doubt.
This proposed standard raises my concerns about the ability to continue using the public internet with user-preferred hardware/software and custom extensions, and does not instill my confidence in maintaining the level of freedom and accessibility users currently enjoy:
Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:
- Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
What information is in the signed attestation?
The proposal calls for at least the following information in the signed attestation:
- The attester's identity, for example, "Google Play".
- A verdict saying whether the attester considers the device trustworthy.
How does this affect browser modifications and extensions?
Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality: E.g. if the browser allows extensions, the user may use extensions; if a browser is modified, the modified browser can still request Web Environment Integrity attestation.
See, this is what happens when we let a single provider monopolize the development of web engines - one party can essentially impose the standards, as it can be clearly seen here.
It has already happened in the past twice, and the monopoly was quickly lost. Netscape and explorer
What makes ads a blight on websites is rather simple when you look at the scheme of things. I understand websites are reliant on monetary factors to keep running such as server costs etc. However, the caveat is balance. A user shouldn’t be inundated by huge amounts of ads. Some of the sites I go to you have pop up windows that show up randomly in the middle of an article as you’re reading, and hard to close without clicking on the ad. Kind of reminds me of back in the day when you would go to a page and the content was overshadowed by those glaring ads that would draw you to them away from the content you were Looking for. As a designer you should not have more ads than you do content. For example, when I left Reddit I was seeing ads on my feed at a rate of almost 1 ad for every 2 posts. That’s overkill. You only need 1 ad every 7 - 10 posts