Dicks sporting goods recently took a stand against firearms that raised the ire of some of its customer base. Tons of companies go out of their way to support political messages all the time. I'd say taking moral/political positions is very much a normal tactic these days in the business world.
Time will tell how it pans out, but my guess is that it isn't some sort of disaster. Most people seem apathetic to such messaging and for every person who decides to buy a chicken sandwich from Popeye's instead of Chik-fil-a in order to "fight hate" there will probably be another one or two who go out of their way to eat Chik-fil-a in order to "stick it to the man" or whatever.
I'm just curious when this phenomenon started. Has it always existed? It seems like a straightforward tactic for building brand loyalty (staking out a position on some sort of lifestyle issue).
Trust me, I live in the south. If the chains don’t sell guns, there will always be some local shops that will.
I'm making a comparison to show you don't need the government to restrict rights - a handful of corporations that control a market can do so just as well. Thinking the government is the only threat to your rights is myopic. The specific activity I chose to illustrate this is utterly besides the point. (Though it is worrying that anyone on this site would think control of your own computer is unimportant.)
> Trust me, I live in the south. If the chains don’t sell guns, there will always be some local shops that will.
It is precisely the passionate pro-2nd-amendment attitude (the same attitude that directed ire towards Dicks) that assures this. To repeat myself - they don't want to wait till their backs are against a wall, to start pushing back. "Don't worry, you still have N-1 computing devices not locked-down by the manufacturer. N-2. N-3. N-4..."
The government is the only threat to my legal rights. Not made up “rights” that a corporation won’t let me do something that I am allowed to do.
What law or part of the constitution says that I have a right to an unlocked phone?
Maybe you'll be happier if I call it an "ability", not a "right", since I am not interested in a debate on what rights are.
To answer your question - none. That's what makes it so easy to lose. But do you not see the problem? Suppose all computers, not just phones, become so locked down. Your computing would be completely under the control of a handful of giant corporations - all without any legal right getting infringed.
Of course I don't need hypotheticals. Lets look at another example: Before the Civil Rights act, no rights were being infringed on by segregated businesses either, and people were free to choose non-segregated businesses. The government wasn't stopping anyone - yet it was still a problem.
> The government is the only threat to my legal rights.
If 100% of the phones on the market automatically censored mentions of Tiananmen Square, are your legal rights still not under threat? It doesn't matter if you're able to exercise your rights, as long as you have them?
The Civil Rights act doesn't cover sexual orientation, so in many states, you can still be fired for being gay. Hypothetically, if 10% of businesses refused to hire gays, would your answer still be "The government is the only threat to their legal rights"? What if it was 50%? 90%? 100%? How high would you let that % go before acting?
In the Federalist papers, James Madison famously said that it wasn't enough for a government to protect its people from the tyranny of a central authority (e.g., a king), a government must also protect various groups from tyrannizing each other.
It doesn't by name, but the pre-Trump EEOC viewed sexual orientation discrimination as necessarily involving gender stereotypes and thus being sex discrimination, and established precedent in two federal appellate circuits along that line; at least one circuit disagreed, and case has been heard by the Supreme Court this month (but not yet decided) which will likely resolve the circuit split.
The constitution is an important part of the legal system, but it's not the only part. There are also laws that legislators pass in service of the desires of the people the government serves.
For one, anti-trust law can potentially provide an avenue for challenging locked down phones. Providing a platform and then inhibiting open competition on that platform to the detriment of consumers is often an antitrust violation (see, for example Microsoft antitrust battles in the 1990s).
But even if current laws do not provide for unlocked phones, society can make new laws that require them. That's the beauty of democracy, we can choose how we want to live.
And the government forcing business to do what the “people want” is fine until the “people” elect someone who doesn’t share your views - whether it be banning guns on the left or restricting the rights of gay people to get married on the Right or banning interracial marriage up until the 60s because “the people” thought it wasn’t “Christian”.
You should always be worried about giving the government - the one entity that can take away your property, liberty and life more power.
In the day of company towns, your livelihood could be taken away at the whim of the company. A business relying on one of the app stores can be (and frequently is) ruined overnight by getting an opaque, unappealable, unexplained ban. Thousands died in the Bhopal disaster due to lax safety, and people have died being wrongly denied insurance they paid for [1]. Entire governments have been toppled by corporations [2]. "beyond question ... the dominant position of the Standard Oil Co. in the refining industry was due to unfair practices—to abuse of the control of pipe-lines, to railroad discriminations, and to unfair methods of competition in the sale of the refined petroleum products" [3] Oil companies knew their product caused global warming, and that it would have global adverse effects, and actively prevented measures against it to be taken, with lobbying and deception [4].
Thinking the government is the only threat to property, liberty, and life, isn't myopic - it's blind. All of feudalism can be re-cast to just landowners exercising their property rights - if the serfs don't like the terms of use, they can find their own land.
You also seem to be working under the assumption that it doesn't matter what kind of 'power' we give to the government. Just more=bad, less=good. There's a huge difference between expanding environmental protections or social programs, and increasing the length of jail terms, the scope of surveillance, and anti-circumvention laws.
[1] https://fox8.com/2018/11/10/aetna-ordered-to-pay-25-5-millio...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Kurtz-Phelan...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
These are the same “social programs” that treat drug abuse as a “disease” in rural America but as something to be at “War” with in the inner city. We can even go as far as the same people who hate “subsidies” when it applies to health care love it to prop up farmers.
Even the EPA is more concerned with protecting the affluent neighborhoods than Flint Michigan.
The government has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted to do anything fairly.
And from this your conclusion is to put lead back into gasoline.
> The government has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted to do anything fairly.
...therefore we shouldn't worry about monopolies, and do nothing about corporate abuses? If you're going to say "vote with your wallet", let me remind you this is known not to work [1].
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta... especially point 2.3.1. But you'd probably benefit from reading all of it.
I’m much more worried about getting stopped by the police because I look like I don’t belong in my own neighborhood and the abuses of the “justice system” than I am about “corporate abuses”. It wasn’t the major corporations that were enforcing Jim Crow laws or that are now trying to take the rights from the LGBT community. They were offering same sex couples benefits before the government forced them to.
How many “Christian Conservatives” would love to “Defend Marriage” now? Yes I know the Democrats don’t have clean hands when it comes to either that or the “War on Crime” which escalated under Clinton.
More recently, California passed a law trying to “help” Uber drivers but ended up making it harder for people who actually wanted to be freelancers and other independent contractors. Whether the government is actively malicious or just incompetent, there are usually unintended consequences.
The “War on Crime” was supported by many Black legislators because they were dumb enough to trust the government.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311452
They can’t go public but they are allowed to sell their ownership. So there is nothing stopping them from creating a shell company, “selling to it” and taking it public or “selling” to a smaller already public company.