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Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

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gonational

No.

You know what sounds nice?

Having the choice to not buy a Tesla.

I don’t need Government™ to tell me what kind of contracts I can agree to.

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> Having the choice to not buy a Tesla.

If Tesla's business model proves successful, all other car makers will copy it, and then it doesn't matter which brand you buy.

Look at the TV market. You technically have the choice not to buy a "Smart TV," which sells your info to god-knows how many third-parties and spies on you 24/7. But good luck finding one. Sony, Samsung, LG? They all have the same spyware features. Your only option is to buy brandless Chinese TVs with terrible picture and worse sound quality.

How long until all manufacturers start acting like Tesla? What choice will we have then? Start walking everywhere like our ancient ancestors?

Can't you just not connect them to the Internet?

This is what I did.

For now, yes, but if the business model is successful enough (particularly for something as expensive as a car), is there anything stopping a manufacturer bundling in their own Internet connection?

The "Smart" software also tends to add a lot of latency, which may or may not be acceptable depending on your circumstances.

You can try. I recently learned that Ethernet-over-HDMI is a thing: now that you know that, you can potentially disable it on the other end of the connection, but lots of people are connecting their TVs to the internet without even knowing.

The protocol supports it yes, but I think you'd have a hard time finding a single person who has ever inadvertently connected their TV to the internet through HDMI. Hell I think you'd have a hard time finding a TV that even supports this functionality, and if you do my bet is it's a specialty thing made for the hospitality/service industry.

How about create a purchasers’ union and use your collective purchasing power to influence the behavior of companies, the way that companies use their power to control consumers.

I don’t have any problem with your union; in fact, I might join such a union. Just don’t force everyone to join it, which is what happens when laws are made for everyone as a result of the bad decisions of some.

I don’t know if such a union is legal to form… which I guess illustrates the point that @gonational is trying to make; too many laws can bite you.

First of all, I don't think it would be practically feasible to do this in the real world. As the old saying goes, if person A finds a way to get 100 million dollars by making 100 million people lose $1 each, he would have every incentive and tool to get that money and no one would have any incentive to stop him. Imagine the enormous costs of forming a purchasers' union, both direct and transaction costs. You can never convince enough people to join one to make it have any negotiation power.

Second and more importantly, the companies have found a way to circumvent one of the most important and fundamental pillars of our civilization, access to judicial system, through forced arbitration and class action waivers. If they had the power to get rid of something this fundamental, I am sure they will find a way to defeat any attempt to form a union like the one you advocate though laws, contracts, EULAs, etc.

The big problem with government and laws is that the more government and laws there are the more an advantage big companies have, since big companies are the only single entities that can stand up against large and complex structures such as government and legal systems.

Pertaining a purchasers’ union, I don’t mean something that would bureaucratically bogged down purchasing. I mean something like a club where you only purchase from those companies approved by the club, and everybody in the club gets to vote on which companies will be allowed to be purchased from.

Sure, very simple logic. That is of course until Comcast becomes the only internet provider in your area. I prefer my gov to have my back on those simple things just in case a particular situation that makes it easy for anyone to screw me over arises.

OK, let’s see if we can think of one solution to that problem… Oh! Enforce existing anti-trust laws!

This, plus the fact that the increasingly monopolistic reality of ISP in the United States is a direct result of overregulation.

We don’t need more laws. We need to enforce some of the most basic laws that have existed fore more than a century.

In your opinion, what is the perfect number of laws anyone should have? 10^4? 10^5?

Unregulated capitalism by no means naturally prevents large monopolies being formed. That's why the government got involved in "trust-busting" in the first place.

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