Blaming the W3C is less effective than blaming the specific W3C members, and browser vendors, who had the power to push this through. Specifically: Google and Microsoft.
Those two companies formulated EME together with Netflix.
I think blaming the W3C is absolutely correct here as well. The W3C has a principle to defend: The open web. And they are simply throwing it overboard by allowing this. TimBL even made a statement in favour of it. Yes, refusing to accept the standard won't change the reality because Google, Microsoft, and Apple are in favour of DRM and they'll do it no matter what the W3C will say. But at least the W3C would stay true to the principles of an open web.
The most offensive part about this whole shenanigans is the sheer hypocrisy behind it.
Hollywood and its friend likes to claim that they need DRM to prevent piracy, to prevent freeloaders from getting use of something they shouldn't. Looking at the big picture though, they are the freeloaders and they are shameless about it too.
They are more than eager to freeload on all the good parts about digital media (zero cost distribution, zero cost storage, zero cost reproduction, etc) while they insist that the business around it should still be limited to the ones they had with tangible, physical media and goods.
Not only that, they want to freeload on all the open, accessible, cross-platform technology we have developed and built to sell their restricted content. And they have the balls to demand that these open standard (which has been successful because of their openness), should now be closed to accommodate their needs!
They are hypocrites from end to end. They want and want and want, but are not willing to give an inch. They demand that we give up our freedom and valuable standards. And for what? To be able to see their content on a restricted service while we pretend its not available in a superior DRM-free format illegally everywhere else on the internet.
It's just disgusting.
Why not just let the whole DRM thing go? Let us access the content in a superior, portable format and don't ruin the future of the web over the semantics of how it gets projected onto the customers screen of choice, on their platform of choice.
Indeed. Now we need to have one plugin, per browser, per operating system supported.
Guess which next emerging OS wont be able to fully access "standard-compliant" HTML5? Yeah. All of them.
W3C should be thrown to the sharks for this.