Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed

Yesterday, the sentiment on Google's early proposal was "company breakups start to make a lot of sense", "Go f yourself, Google", "It's maddening and saddening", "[the people involved] reputations are fully gone from this".

Today it turns out Apple not only proposed but implemented and shipped the actual feature last year. "It could be an interesting opportunity to reboot a few long-lost dreams". "I kind of get both sides here". "I guess I personally come down to leaving this turned on in Safari for now, and seeing what happens". Granted, the overall sentiment is still negative but the difference in tone is stark. The reality distortion field is alive and well, folks.

Probably not the RDF but rather that Google is famously bottoms-up driven, they're asking for feedback in an open forum, and the proposal is by individuals who are responding as individuals. One of them even posted to Hacker News. That unfortunately incentivizes bullying behavior by people who don't like it and hope that if they're nasty enough, the individuals in question will give up.

Apple has no time for any of that. They consider, they plan, they act. You never learn the identities of anyone involved, they don't generally ask for feedback, they often don't even give the justifications for their plans, and squishy tech sentimentalities are considered irrelevant compared to consumer UX. Getting mad at what Apple does on some web forum is no more useful than getting mad at a brick wall.

There are reasons why the "faceless corporation" is a cliché, after all. It's a deliberate policy designed to protect employees.

This is not true. Remember iCloud scanning for CSAM? Even though Apple was simply creating a process to do what everyone else (GDrive, OneDrive) was already doing, only with MORE privacy protections, they scrapped the entire thing after significant backlash.

Consumer voice is powerful. It shouldn't be underestimated.