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#Google's new #WEI spec proposes a major threat to the open #web. Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner spoke to The Register and expressed his concern over Google's new API.
"The solution to the surveillance economy seems to be more surveillance' Vivaldi's boss tells El Reg". Here's the full story 
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/google_web_environment_integrity/
@Vivaldi My understanding is that Google wants to push WEI into Chromium, not just Chrome. Since Vivaldi uses the Chromium codebase, could this affect them, and other Chromium based projects?
@Syulang It's even worse - if websites adopt this new standard, all browsers (Chromium or not) will be effectively forced to implement it. Otherwise, they may lose access to websites requiring WEI support.
See our answer to the question "Can we just refuse to implement it?" here: https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/
@Vivaldi fuuuuuuuudge
I’m afraid part entirely demolishes the whole #Google defence of WEI:
What WEI’s attestation check actually looks for has not been revealed. Nor is it evident from the WEI code that has been added to the Chromium open source project. But Wisner insists, “WEI is not designed to single out browsers or extensions” and is not designed to block browsers that spoof their identity.
Translating that into human language: we want to push a black-box attestation token into the relation between a browser and the web server, but we will neither reveal nor standardise what is subject of the attestation.
Which of course means that immediately after WEI gains enough market share Google, Amazon, CloudFlare and other participants of the web oligopoly will offer their customers a default option to only allowing “attested” clients to their web applications, which means users of browsers or browser extensions not signing up to Google WEI terms-of-service will simply lose access to majority of the websites.
Whatever Google engineers write today in the GitHub issues on WEI and however reasonable and goodwill that sounds, it’s completely non-binding for Google business directors and they will make sure they will extract 100% business benefits from WEI as soon as it works.