Update, not that anyone cares.
Bafflingly, the proposal has been retracted and been restricted to something that’s android-only.
That’s still not a good thing, just a less bad thing, since we can still have device level bans by way of a “prove you’re a human by scanning this QR code” or something, it’s just the phone that would be banned.
Still, all, I can think of is,
WHY?
This thing is perfect for giving google everything they want! Device-specific bans for blocking ads on youtube or any other site with google ads would have been fantastic for revenue. They’re still doing that by they way, but through something specific to android.
Cloudflare would have loved it too, imagine never having to worry about spammers or scrapers or ddos again.
Social media would have loved being able to enforce permanent bans on people who their customers paid them to censor.
Microsoft was totally on board with it, with employees insulting critics.
Government censors and law enforcement would have loved being able to order websites to stop serving a specific device.
They even took the discussion from GitHub to another site where only people approved by Rupert Ben Wiser could say anything about the proposal, so he already had nothing but yes-men talking about it.
And we live in a world where you can get away with any amount of horrible behavior by calling your opponents bigots.
So what reason could they possibly have to stop the implementation?
Here’s what I think:
- There was a credible threat of an anti-trust lawsuit.
- OpenAI, which now makes up like 20% of all web activity (they’re the huge growth in “other” on browser stats), would have been compromised by this.
- I doubt they compromised just to shut people up. People gave into despair and stopped talking about this within a week, and they retracted the proposal much later. There’s really no fight left in people anymore. No one would notice if they tried this again.
- And as I mentioned, they’ve got both phone operating systems doing this anyway (Linux phones are these days considered another failed experiment and do not exist thus have no rights). There may be no difference other than how annoying it is.