This is one of the most important points about DRM.

DRM are marketed to users (and the society, including politicians) and to artists as a way to prevent copies. Most engineers implementing DRMs think so too. And all the discussions we've seen on HTML5 are around this. People have little arguments against this because it "sounds morally good" to help artist "live of their creations".

I am the de facto maintainer of libdvdcss, and have been involved on libbluray (and related projects) and a few other libraries of the same style; I've done several conferences on this precise subject and I've fought the French High-Authority-on-DRM in legal questioning about an unclear piece of law... Therefore, I've studied DRM quite closely...

The truth is that if you consider the main goal of DRM to prevent copies, no DRM actually work. ALL of them got defeated in a way or another. Indeed, GoT-broadcast-to-top-of-TPB time is counted in a couple of hours; so why do they try to push those technologies still?

The answer is probably because the main goal of DRM is to control distribution channels, not copy-prevention. Copy-prevention is a side goal.

This post of Ian is excellent to explain this.

PS: You can see me speaking of the same point, in French, in June 2013 here: http://www.acuraz.net/team-videolan-lors-de-pas-sage-en-sein...

NB: I'm not discussing here whether DRM are good or bad.

If we should train our guns somewhere it should be at the W3C; the guardians of web standards. W3C shouldn't have legitimized this feature by bringing it into standards discussions. The media companies would have had to comply eventually. They had no future without distribution over the internet. Now of course, they have hope.

Mozilla had no chance once Google, MS, Apple and everybody else decided to support EME. Most users don't care if they fought for open standards. They are probably just going to say that Firefox sucks.

If you ask me, Mozilla could be the most important software company in the world. The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future. It is important that they stay healthy for what lies ahead.

The title and post are both quite misleading. The commissioners didn't approve Tom Wheeler's plan (to regulate the Internet under Section 706), but voted to go ahead with the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and commenting period. Tom Wheeler stated multiple times that Title II classification is still on the table.

There'll now be a 120 day commenting period; 60 days of comments from companies and the public, and then 60 days of replies to those comments from the same. After that, the final rulemaking will happen.

It's likely that the docket number for comments will continue to be 14-28, so if you want to ask the FCC to apply common carrier rules to the Internet under Title II, you can do so here: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=r8e2h and you can view previous comments here: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment_search/execute?proceeding=1...

It's probably best to wait until the actual text of the NPRM is made public though, which'll likely happen very soon.

Edit: WaPo have now updated the title of the article to make it more accurate: "FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet." Old title was "FCC approves plan to allow for paid priority on Internet."