>You can choose not to send this to the remote server, but you lose the ability to send an altered or randomized description of your device and its software if you think that's best for you.

The EFF is being misleading here by conflating the attestation taken and fingerprintable information like a user agent. An attestation taken does not contain information about the device that can be used to identify since the data the site gets is low entropy. WEI doesn't stop you from changing your user agent, nor does it prevent you from using your privacy web extentions.

>But, despite their valiant attempts to cast these benefits as accruing to device owners, these are really designed to benefit the owners of commercial services; the benefit to users comes from the assumption that commercial operators will use the additional profits from remote attestation to make their services better for their users.

End users are not the only stake holders in the web. I would say most changes to the web are for people who develop sites and end users benefit from sites using those features.

>Putting handcuffs on every shopper who enters a store would doubtless reduce shoplifting, and stores with less shoplifting might lower their prices, benefitting all of their customers. But ultimately, shoplifting is the store’s problem, not the shoppers’, and it’s not fair for the store to make everyone else bear the cost of resolving its difficulties.

This metaphor isn't the same since WEI is transparent to users. Physical handcuffs would be very intrusive, but that isn't what is happening here. Shop lifting affects the profitablity of the store. A better metaphor would be a bouncer for a club. Technically a club could have a set of rules of entering and customers could promise that they follow them. Unfortunately, people lie and just trusting them isn't good enough so clubs end up adding bouncers even though they don't directly make the experience for customers better.

>The problem is, there are lots of websites that would really, really like the power to dictate what browser and operating system people can use

This claim needs a citation of where user agent based blocking isn't enough. People spoofing their user agent won't make much of a difference to support costs of the site.

>The web is the last major open platform left on the internet - the last platform where anyone can make a browser or a website and participate, without having to ask permission or meet someone else’s specifications.

WEI doesn't prevent you from participating in the web or needing to meet someone else's specification. You can even make an attestation service for your own browser.

>We sympathize with businesses whose revenues might be impacted by ad-fraud, game companies that struggle with cheaters, and services that struggle with bots. But addressing these problems can’t come before the right of technology users to choose how their computers work, or what those computers tell others about them, because the right to control one’s own devices is a building block of all civil rights in the digital world..

To prevent ad fraud either you need to increase the fingerprintablity of users on the web, violating people's privacy, or implemented a form of remote attestation, which protects people's privacy.

If EFF cares no much about privacy on the web they should be in favor of this proposal.

I disagree that beivg a to lie about what your device is running in a building block of all civil rights because the physical analog, fraud, is illegal, and the world seems better without people commuting fraud to one another.