the bbc is not one person. While i am proud of many of the things that bbc has created, this is an instance of the wrong people using bbc to further their interests.
Commercial interests will be expected to have a say, but shouldn't be the ones to decide the future of the internet. However, money talks and i don't expect the internet to remain free unless we as stakeholders do something about it.
The most obvious solution would be to boycott all DRM encumbered content. That could certainly work at a HN level, but the money of the billions of other people who don't really understand what DRM is still speaks quite loudly.
You could educate and advocate a broader boycott, but in practise what you would be asking people to do would be to forgo the majority of mainstream pop culture. Basically a tragedy of the commons.
The only other solution would be to propose legislation that would make illegal or punish those who integrate DRM. The only political party in the UK who would be open to such an idea would be the pirate party who will never win a general election because there are very few people to whom copyright law is the #1 hotbutton political issue.
Breaking DRM doesn't seem to be effective in terms of stopping people trying to apply it. The issue is not so much the DRM itself but how invasive the software is.
For example the ultimate form of DRM is the iOS style where code must be explicitly white listed by some authority in order to execute. This is potentially bad for all kinds of reasons that are nothing to do with piracy.
The trusted platform model has its advantages and not everyone wants to root their phone. I've never understood the argument that the world would be freer if we banned iOS.
It's not that trusted platform models do not have their advantages (indeed they could be used to implement systems that are "freer") or that we need to ban iOS.
However any system that relies on absolute centralised trust is vulnerable in a variety of ways.
For example if you were to develop a system that allows for secure , encrypted communications between 2 parties such as GPG.
The platform vendor can enforce a policy that any such software must include a backdoor for their own use, that of law enforcement or for their advertising partners.
Whether such a policy is implemented now or not is not so much the issue, it is that such a policy could very easily be enforced in the future.
As long as open platforms are viable and available the issue is less urgent since people can opt to use these instead.
However when you have powerful companies with lobbying might such as the various content industries who have their own reasons for preferring such a model it becomes a little scary.
i can understand why people hate walled gardens. An open sw/hw system would have meant growth opportunities for more people and companies rather than just apple. We have a little bit more open system with android but with all the locked bootloaders on android devices we could do better.
I certainly know hippy type people who would care about stuff like this at an ideological level but are not technical enough to understand the specifics and would struggle to identify whether the video they are playing on their computer is DRM protected or not.
Commercial interests will be expected to have a say, but shouldn't be the ones to decide the future of the internet. However, money talks and i don't expect the internet to remain free unless we as stakeholders do something about it.