I'll add to this, notably, issues are still closed after the weekend: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

If this proposal gets rejected it'll be because of feedback in the press that is impossible to ignore. My experience watching how Google has handled contentious issues in the past makes me personally feel that Google will not be receptive to concerns about whether this spec should exist. Google and the Chromium team are not willing to hear community feedback about the direction of the web or about what the web should be. They demand that feedback start from a position of assuming the best intentions of the spec, and start from a position of assuming that the spec is basically good and might just have additional concerns to address (https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_li...).

This has been a longstanding issue with how Google approaches web standards; according to Google there's no such thing as a harmful feature and Google's approach is never wrong; it just might need refining. The refining is the only thing that Google wants to talk about.

There is a predictable arc to this narrative as well. If blowback gets out of control, Google will blame that blowback on misinformation and accuse the community of operating in bad faith or fearmongering. At best, you'll get a few people from the Chromium team saying "we hear you and we need to communicate better." Note the underlying implication behind that statement that the original proposal wasn't bad, it just wasn't communicated well. People just need to do a better job of "getting involved" in the web standards process so that the Chromium team knows to address their concerns. And it just comes down to learning to be kind and "remembering the human" -- ie ignoring the structural damage that the human is capable of causing to the largest and arguably most important Open platform on the planet.

There will never in any situation be an acknowledgement that the direction or intent was wrong; that's just overwhelmingly not how the Chromium team operates on any issue big or small.

It's good for larger sites like Ars to cover this, and it's good for people to share thoughts on social media; the only way that users have a say over this is if the press runs with it and generates a metric ton of bad publicity for Google; and even then it's a toss-up. It comes down to what the company feels like it can ignore or dismiss with a couple of Twitter posts. And this is not just where issues like adblocking are concerned, the Chromium team has been hostile to user feedback even on more minor technical issues for a pretty long while. I was writing about this issue back in 2018 (https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay) and it was a trend before that point as well.

It stinks to go into a conversation not assuming good will from all of the parties (and it usually is wrong to do so), but the Chromium team has not earned an assumption of good will, and it's done quite a bit to squander that assumption. It's regrettably kind of a waste of time to try and engage on this stuff, it's better to just criticize on social media and hope that the press runs with it. Because that's the only thing that Google listens to.