As a practical matter, it's unlikely that the petition could ever be meaningful. Even if W3C decided to drop EME, there are enough important companies working on the spec—including Netflix, Google, and Microsoft—that a common platform will be built. The only difference is whether it happens under the W3C umbrella or merely as a de facto standard assembled by all the interested parties. Keeping it out of W3C might have been a moral victory, but its practical implications would sit between slim and none. It doesn't matter if browsers implement "W3C EME" or "non-W3C EME" if the technology and its capabilities are identical.

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However, it's not clear that EME does anything to exacerbate that situation. The users of EME—companies like Netflix—are today, right now, already streaming DRM-protected media. It's difficult to imagine that any content distributors that are currently distributing unprotected media are going to start using DRM merely because there's a W3C-approved framework for doing so.

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Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely. Want to send DRM-protected video to an iPhone? "There's an app for that." Native applications on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 can all implement DRM, with some platforms, such as Android and Windows 8, even offering various APIs and features to assist this. In other words, the alternative to using DRM in browser plugins on the Web is not "abandoning DRM;" it's "abandoning the Web."