Can anyone eli5 this?
Google (The company behind Chrome) wants to create a type of DRM for web pages. Google claims that this will help with things like bot traffic, spam, etc.
Mozilla (The company behind firefox) is opposed to creating this DRM because it has no benefit to the end user and is likely to be harmful to the openness of the internet.
But does Mozilla’s opposition have any final say in the thing getting implemented in the standard?
Somewhat. Webstandards are voted upon, and I believe Mozilla is part of those organizations.
However Google could always choose to ignore web standards and do what they want. And due to their massive market dominance this would effectively enforce this overnight for over half of the internet.
The reason they may not, is the EU would take them to court over that. The US no longer believes in stopping companies from ruining shit though.
If you aren’t using Firefox yet. Start, ASAP.
Google tried to exert control on the internet with web manifest v3 and now again here. Letting google dictate web standards is a mistake. Using Firefox shows companies they need to support more than chrome.