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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

This is a fundamental problem with the single DRM-enforced app store model that Apple innovated, and which has been widely copied and lauded.

Once you implement that, you have to toady up to whatever governments exist, including oppressive/murderous regimes, to be in their markets.

If your ecosystem is just console video games, say, it's not that big of a deal; you have to either censor some games or don't enter certain countries at all. Might be unfortunate, but its not a fundamental human rights issue.

But if your ecosystem is about general-purpose apps and communication tools, you become complicit to some degree in all sorts of vile shit; oppression and forced relocation of minorities (China), mass murder of gay people (Russia), etc.

There's no way around this for Apple; they have to cave to government demands or risk being forced out of the Russian market. That wasn't inevitable, though; it's a side effect of the model they chose.

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> If your ecosystem is just console video games, say, it's not that big of a deal; you have to either censor some games or don't enter certain countries at all. Might be unfortunate, but its not a fundamental human rights issue.

Be careful of the ground you might concede to the censors. Freedom of expression is most certainly a fundamental human right:

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/quotes/universal-declar...

It's easy to dismiss video games as "lesser" forms of art or expression, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for games to convey significant social and political messages (both positive and negative).

In case a concrete example is needed of a thought-provoking video game with artistic merit, let me suggest this to those who haven't seen or played it:

http://www.papersplea.se/

There isn’t a single source of truth on what is or isn’t a “fundamental human right.” It’s a matter of opinion that differs across time and geography.

Then make an argument about whether or not you consider freedom of expression to be a fundamental human right. You have stated that arguments on the topic are possible. You have done absolutely nothing to argue any position on the matter.

While it's not as universal as its name makes it seem, the UN uses The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... That would be a good starting point since it already backed by some pretty powerful countries.

You are right. That sounded more dismissive than I intended, and I agree on both counts; video games can be artistic masterpieces, and freedom of expression is a very important and fundamental human right.

So censorship of games is bad, too. But in my judgement, it is probably not going to rise the the level of interning or murdering people at scale.

Will check out the game. ;-)

This is why we must eradicate proprietary software from our general purpose computers, because computers are the single most powerful weapon we have for freedom and self-improvement.

It doesn't matter too much if your videogame console is closed source, but it matters a lot if the software you use to read books, to write, to communicate with people is closed source.

Apple isn't going to do it, Google isn't going to do it. We must do it.

There are three ways of slicing the problem: the technical capability of loading whatever apps you want, the legal ability to do so, and the ecosystem / game theoretical (is it a reasonable way of doing things - e.g. living without gapps is possible but very hard in practice).

Back when Stallman outlined the distinction between proprietary vs open, he meant all of the above in spirit, but never really addressed the hosting and server-side side of things. I think it's currently still a weak spot in his philosophy. Open-source software doesn't truly solve the server-side if your phone has a hardcoded "ax.itunes.apple.com" - in theory, you could modify & recompile & host your own, but it wouldn't be a first-class-citizen thing. Also, consider e.g. if Apple's stack was open but highly customized - you needed a team of engineers and a swath of servers to simply get a clone up and running. Again, not impossible, but I don't think open-source is only a part of the solution.

Well, 100% conversion of the entire world to open-source software would indeed solve the issue I describe. But, I have only 57 more years to live[1], and I don't think I will likely see that happen in my remaining time on earth.

Another way to prevent this issue is simply to have open computing platforms without significant barriers to running arbitrary software, and without any gatekeeper that can prevent them. This is mostly how computers have worked since their inception, and indeed is still how Apple's macOS machines work.

I am not saying that this model can prevent atrocities, but it can prevent companies like Apple from being complicit in those atrocities.

(But I think it's likely that this kind of platform model would benefit at-risk populations to some degree, too, because when there's no effective gatekeeper, there's no central point for a state actor wishing to do evil to apply pressure to.)

[1]: I just assume I will live to 100. :)

But we still have model — Apple isn’t a monopoly in any way.

> mass murder of gay people (Russia)

any source on that? I have never heard about any murdering of gay people in russia.

Clearly, Russia is rather hostile to gay people. But "mass murder" requires a proper source. Or you you are walking on the Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction path.

Well, here are a few sources (I think the first one might be where I originally read about it, and realized the situation there was worse than I knew):

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2017-in-review/the-year-ru...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/27/russia-chechny...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_concentration_camps_in_Che...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/russia-rise-ho...

None of those in any way support your comment, whatsoever.

And calling Chechnya Russia is similar to calling Peurto Rico the United States. It's a subject of Russia, but is not what you'd call Russia. It's a 95% Islamic nation that waged a lengthy war of terror attacks against Russia and has its own independent government, rules, and laws which are driven primarily by Islamic law. You'll find nations driven by Islamic law tend to make Russia look like LGBT heaven.

Of course Russia is no such thing. It's illegal in Russian to distribute 'propaganda' for homosexual or bisexual advocacy in the presence of minors. And that in turn is used as a justification to prevent nearly all public homosexual or bisexual activism, though people are free to do whatever they want in private. In any case stating Russia is engaging in "mass murder of gay people" is something way beyond sensationalism and a reflection of how our media's efforts at creating a Red Scare has, arguably intentionally, driven people completely to the point of overt ignorance. It's like wartime propaganda, without a war.

Hmm, I'm American, so I can tell you Puerto Rico absolutely is part of the United States.

My understanding is that Chechnya is part of Russia in a similar way, but I'm not an expert there, so maybe I'm wrong. If so, then I should have said "murder of gays in the Russian Federation" or "in Chechnya".

But, I mean, I could have instead said "state-sponsored assassinations of journalists and political opponents in Russia".

The specific atrocities involved are kind of incidental to my point that if you decide to operate a DRM-enforced single-source app store platform, you are going to have to get into bed with authoritarian governments if you want to sell your platform in the countries they control.

(That said, I will google the relationship between the Russian Federation, Russia, and Chechnya a bit more, so that I can state things more precisely in the future.)

> Hmm, I'm American, so I can tell you Puerto Rico absolutely is part of the United States.

You misunderstand. They're saying that referring to the entire US (or Russia) when you really only mean Puerto Rico (or Chechnya) is somewhat disingenuous, and clouds what is actually being said.

There is no Russia in Russian Federation at all, because original Russia (Rus`, Русь) renamed itself into Ukraine to avoid any associations with bloody Russian Empire.

So Chechnya is the same region of Russian Federation as any other region.

PS.

Look at folk culture, especially at folk songs. You will found that each region of Russian Federation has it own language for folk songs and none of them are in Russian language. It because Russian Empire was formed by clumping together nations and bolting Russian language at top of them by forbidding all native languages. (It's why Russian Empire was called as Jail of Nations).

In contrast, there is 15 thousands of folk songs recorded in Ukrainian(Rus`) language (200 thousands if variants are counted).

Russians will downvote my post, so if you see it in grey, upvote it please.

While chch is definitely not russian in any way, the good question is why they didn’t come for lgbt so massively before it was stated as russian law. It is not that you’re wrong, but this kind of thinking just supports the status quo – there is a region in RF that can turn anyone into an example. Not to mention a green light for these organized thugs almost everywhere in western russia. IMO they are controlled and guided from above, no doubt.

Before I had written my comment, I quickly did a search and found some info in Chechnya which I didn't follow.

Seeing your links, I went to wikipedia to understand what Chechnya is.

It appears to be an area in political unrest.

Right now only 1,9% people in Chechnya are russian.

So I guess it makes more sense to say "there is mass murder in Chechnya"?

And reading the first article, I don't even understand who is doing that, Chechnya people or russian people who live there? or russians from outside of Chechnya?

So my conclusion: what you're saying, is at least exaggerated and at worst just misleading on purpose.

But Apple has to obey the laws of the United States. Here is an alternative viewpoint:

If Apple is based in the "right" country (that believes in freedom) -- and I think you and I seem to agree this is the case, because you don't mention anything bad about the U.S., mentioning only Russia and China by name, and with descriptions like "vile shit", "mass murder", "oppression" --, then the U.S. government should be doing whatever negotiations and interventions need to take place to keep foreign governments from forcing a U.S. company to do evil.

Here is an analogy. If you're CEO at a Fortune 500 American company, you don't have to make your life choices so that foreign governments can't blackmail you into doing evil, by kidnapping your family. Because the government protects you from that. If Tim Cook's family were abducted by China to force Tim Cook to have Apple do something... well this scenario is just completely implausible, the whole weight of the entire U.S. government would be all over it, it would be an international issue of immense proportions.

I think it's kind of up to the government to keep foreign companies from forcing American companies to do bad things.

It kind of isn't up to the U.S. government. It's about how you structure your organization to have the right incentives to do the right thing.

Apple and numerous other businesses are beholden to shareholders, whose #1 demand is profit. Many shareholders are located in the U.S. - so far, so good.

At some point, the business decides that more profit is best obtained through international expansion. Apple extracts money from Europe, China, Russia etc. and delivers the desired returns. Yay.

The flipside is that if those returns are in danger of disappearing, there's now an immense pressure to stop that from happening. I don't believe the U.S. government can even help Apple if they don't want to be helped - their primary incentive is not preservation of diversity and free speech, but satisfying the shareholders.

Possible fixes:

a) Avoid conflicts of interest. Apple is not an American company at this point, it's an international company. So, limit your market reach to regions that align with your principles, i.e. don't expand to Russia and China. Of course, this can never work because public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns. Which leads to,

b) Put incentives in place to prefer doing the right thing over the profitable thing, i.e. don't sell a voting majority of your business to investors who will sacrifice principles for money.

Both of these fixes mean sacrificing market share to other, less morally grounded businesses, because you don't get to be a world leader in selling stuff by playing fair. You can't go back to playing fair once you depend on being a world leader. Apple literally can't do anything about it because of what its incentives are, and if it aligned those differently then it wouldn't be the big Apple that we give a shit about.

I don't believe there's a solution to this except supporting a decentralized market and educating others about why that's important. Apple is a lost cause, they're at the point of no return. They couldn't fix it if they wanted to. Let's make sure they're only one of several viable options going forward.

I don't think the US government has the desire or ability to do that.

Also, I didn't mean to imply by omission that the United States government is not a bad actor. An evidence-based examination of the US government will reveal that it is (when taken as a whole) a deeply and objectively racist institution, has more people incarcerated than China and Russia combined, has killed far more civilians over the past 20 years than China and Russia combined, etc.

But as you say, American companies and individuals typically enjoy a far higher degree of freedom from governmental interference than their counterparts in (say) China and Russia.

So the reason I didn't mention the US government in this context is simply that they don't exert that type of control (at least, not yet) on platform companies like Apple.

Although parts of the US government are trying to ban encryption, and trying to force companies like Apple to create backdoors for the various secret police and law enforcement institutions, they don't seem to be successful with that so far.

>But if your ecosystem is about general-purpose apps and communication tools, you become complicit to some degree in all sorts of vile shit; oppression and forced relocation of minorities (China), mass murder of gay people (Russia), etc.

I wonder if it would be possible to sort of fence off communication tools to a more open area of the ecosystem.... like everything in an curated app store.... then another space where it is a bit of the wild west but you don't control what is installed... sort of Android's ability to side load apps....

Granted this is convoluted and I guess there's nothing keeping that side channel from becoming all pirated apps from the other store....

well that thought experiment didn't work.

What about mass incarceration of black people (USA)? Should Apple play nicely with them too?

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