My apologies, I intentionally try to make terse replies to keep S/N as high as possible, often people will attempt to highlight the same problem they have from multiple angles. In any case, my reply above was unsatisfactory, and that was most likely due to my alcohol intake at the time (on a revelry weekend with a friend in the middle of the Baltic). :-)

I'll attempt to reply again, and address each of your points. The initial 'suspicion' is largely based on how heavily NaCl has been getting pushed in recent times, it is of strategic importance to the company somehow, and that is what interests me. Whether or not my opinion turns out to be correct or not, largely to me is immaterial, it's just sufficient that it is possible for some strategy involving NaCl to result in an endgame where vendors competing in the platforms space suddenly find themselves with a fundamentally compelling competitor that they can't easily fight against.

As for why there is a conspiratorial tone to the article, well, that's simply because I do not trust the company in the long term (as stated somewhere in the comments).

On to your specific replies:

> How is that related to VP8?

NaCl may well be a vaguely open platform for the time being, but in the long term, and crucially, as it gathers mass acceptance, it is also a platform on which the better resourced players in various ongoing wars can easily be victorious, and that is where the video connection appears.

Video decoding is a natural use case for NaCl (fast graphics output, fast network input, efficient on CPU), I'd be dearly surprised if within 2 years of its mass deployment, some video vendor, somewhere, decided to tie their tweaked h.264-alike together with some crypto code and market it as a "secure content delivery platform", in a similar vein to the kind of capabilities (much loved by content providers) available in Flash today (RTMPE).

It's not a question of fear mongering, it is a question of whether or not it is technically possible, and if so, whether some company, somewhere would be willing to pay for it. In the DRM'd video case, I believe the answer here is an unquestionable yes.

For another perspective, BBC.co.uk only recently switched to Flash for the majority of their content, not because it is somehow technically superior to RealPlayer (their previous choice), but most likely owing to whatever commercial agreements between the two companies finally expired. Faced with a well resourced salesman and a proprietary video technology, guaranteed agreements like this will appear in the future given a suitable platform for the technology implementation.

The (not too far fetched, I believe, and certainly not "fantastically unsupported") conclusion is that if a fast platform for networking/graphics powered by binary blobs becomes widely deployed, it will likely be used to close up or at least occlude the openness of content on at least a few of the larger sites.

> Here you are again implying that somehow the introduction of NaCl will block us from "our data".

This follows in a similar vein to the previous answer: given a technology, you can be assured someone will make use of it in some arbitrarily stupid/inconvenient way. Banks already proved their ridiculous approaches to security in the 00's by wrapping their login processes up in ActiveX controls. I will happily put large sums of money on this reappearing if NaCl or a similar technology gains widespread deployment (many banks to this day still insist on Java).

> What is the difference between writing [...] that runs in NaCl.

> What platform easily runs on all devices? How does NaCl remove the ability to use any others?

I actually did write the answer to this previously. Once a platform gains critical mass and gets deployed everywhere (especially because the controlling company has easy access to a huge audience to which to sell it), and that platform is controlled by a single vendor, you may suddenly find yourself in the undesirable situation of being forced to use that vendor in order to reach your customers (or even before your customers will buy from you!). Given the privileged position of that vendor, you can only pray to your deities the vendor never chooses to compete in your problem space, as inevitably they are in a much better position to extend the platform as they desire to make it much more compelling or economical for 3rd parties to use their solution, rather than yours.

This has happened repeatedly in a million different fields, not least there still exists a huge number of corporations who won't touch anything that doesn't run on Microsoft, or at least talk to Active Directory. Is it so far fetched to imagine a world where a company won't touch your small company's solution because it doesn't speak Google Authentication or Google Contacts API?

There are a million Microsoft comparisons to be made here. Already, in the right light, you could consider Google's approach to advertising their products as abusive. By dropping a single link (at a cost of near zero) on their front page, over half the Internet is likely to see that advertisement at least once a day.

It bares little effort to make comparisons to a time when Microsoft had a dominant technology base and range of products that allowed them to almost force Netscape off the market. A little word in the ears of their sales channel guys (Google home page) a little bundling here ("get Chrome with Google Earth today!"), and a little integration there ("now seemlessly switch to Earth view via maps API.. no code changes required!"), and competing browsers might find themselves increasingly impotent. [Note, I used as an example here Google Earth as being the thing promoted unfairly, at the disadvantage of other mapping providers, however the text speaks about browsers.. just make up some example of your own, it's not hard]

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To claim this is "just another technology" is as if to claim around the time NT was shipping that Win32 was "just another bundle of APIs". You totally ignore the positioning of the company behind those APIs, the company's long term goals, and totally ignore the company survival instincts, as the profits of each market they enter slowly reaches plateau, and their need to expand yet more in the name of maintaining shareholder yields.

If you'd like, I am happy to reply further to your other comment, but already this one has taken nearly half an hour.