Mozilla did take a principled stand against DRM. It proposed an alternative to EME that involved watermarking content rather than client-side DRM. But the combination of Google, Microsoft, and Netflix was enough to win over the W3C, and by the time that the developer community at large finally got up in arms about it (late 2012, early 2013) it was already too late to change course; by that point, Chrome was already shipping EME for use with Netflix. The tragedy is that Mozilla did try, and nobody cared. And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).
> And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).
I don't think the industry consortium is really even that relevant here; it was proposed to the W3C in Feb 2012 jointly by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and already had a fairly well fleshed out proposal. It was shipped in Chrome, with Netflix supporting it, little over a year later. I'm fairly certain those three companies would've gone ahead with it regardless of what the outcome of the W3C proposal was.
