Welcome to late stage capitalism. The free Fed money train is over, time to squeeze the plebians to death.

I feel like I fully lack the words to describe what I mean here, although I’m confident in my understanding of the idea. (Which is to say, please give me charity when untangling my rambling.)

I share your sentiment and I’ve been thinking about this the past few days.
I’ve read in a few places that Musk is trying to turn twitter into a ‘one-app’ in the same way that WeChat is. The common pushback against that is that we already have that - it’s the web browser. The web browser isn’t going anywhere.
But turning the browser into a closed ecosystem that Google gets to set the standard for, harvest the data for, advertise through, and ensure that users are locked in to their version of the experience/data that they collect essentially makes Chrome the one-app.

In much the same way that google killed XMPP, Microsoft used its weight to hamstring open document formats - this seems like an effort to thread a rope around the neck of the open internet and use google’s considerable market share to close off the open internet.

Somewhat ironically, we may find ourselves in search of a ‘new, open internet’ if corporations continue to define our current internet.
Maybe we’ll call it “Web 1.0.”

Not the Internet, that is neutral. It is only one large corp that is trying to control the Internet. If everyone boycotts them, then they will fail.

This. Like for real. I might be in a minority here but but I'm not going to just accept this crap and deal with it. If you implement these changes and your site is not absolutely essential for me then I'm going elsewhere. If 90% of big websites become unusable with my browser then I'm going to hang in the rest 10% with my like-minded folks. I don't care that it's quiet and much more slow paced, it's still better than the shit everyone else is serving and frakly better for my mental health aswell.

I spent like 2 to 3 hours on reddit every single day for 10 years. Then they killed my favourite app and I just quit then and there and haven't looked back. I have no problem doing that again.

And what happens when they decide to revoke that 5-10% after they got everyone onboard?

Thats such a weird clause to include and is likely just a honeypot. Why even bother allowing unverified browsers to connect, since it invalidates the entire purpose of the trust system? If any bad actor can simply choose to not use the trust system while still having full access, then the system is less than useless for its stated purpose (catch bots/bad faith traffic, ensure no malware) and serves only to decrease the speed and experience of legitimate users.

That opt-out clause won't last a year once it's mandatory in Chromium.

An attestation method that randomly fails in 5-10% of cases makes no sense. It's not attestation anymore, it's a game of dice. This is blatant rhetoric in response to the DRM criticism. Nobody sane would ever use such a method.

If this is the case then what's actually the point of it?

The developers working on this should not be believed and anyone who sees their resume for the rest of time should put it directly in the trash.

Honestly, they could have good grounds for an antitrust lawsuit if this API comes to pass and everyone uses Google attestation servers. It's gardenwalling the browser space just like Microsoft was.

Then don't use Google. I'm slowly but surely working towards degoogling myself. Not there quite yet, but I'm working on it.

https://dispostable.com

^ Free anonymous email, for the B/S that asks for an email when they got no business with one.

Firefox will be in a tight corner assuming every other browser vendor picks this up. They can decide to go against it but Firefox does not live in isolation.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-mission-and-w3c-eme/

The devs responsible for this say their goal is to detect bots, but make sure it doesn't harm people not using this tech. I'm actually inclined to be believe them. The problem is that those guardrails could turn out to be ineffective, or Google could decide to just disable them at some point.