Why the future of web browsers belongs to the biggest tech firms

[Commentary] Ten years ago, there were two web browsers that anyone cared about: Netscape and Internet Explorer. Skip to 2016 and the web is a very different place. The World Wide Web Consortium, the not-for-profit organization that creates the web’s open technology standards, made a brave effort to tame the web’s lunatic proprietary HTML extensions that paid off, making those “Best viewed with” badges on websites a relic of the past. All the browsers have changed, too: Netscape vanished, Mozilla begat Firefox, Internet Explorer morphed into Edge, and Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome grew from obscure side projects to two of the dominant forces on the web. Ten years is an eternity in web years, and in a decade, everything can change. However, that change might be coming to an end thanks to the existing web browser vendors and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Since 2013 they’ve been working with Netflix, the cable industry, and the MPAA to create a standard to limit which browsers can display W3C-standardised data. It could mean goodbye to “just works” and hello again to “best viewed with”. The world has entered the age of giants: giant media companies, giant banks, giant tech companies. Where giants tread, mere mortals tremble, and hope for a day when they will be cut down to size. With the W3C acting like they’re a permanent fact of life, that day may never come.

[Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing]