Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There are tools though through which we can mitigate verticals and have in the past:

- regulated markets (eg limiting service bundling such as free email financed by targeted ads, tying devices to social logins, predatory social network effects, mandating availability of profile data for ad targeting to third parties, stopping ad platform Ponzi schemes eg without objective third-party efficacy measurement, create strong consumer laws against entertainment devices wanting to track and send ads to you, rethink 5G networking)

- mandate standard formats for your data/text providers to export at your request for you to move to another provider

- stop hw/sw bundling and/or tax closed hw/sw platforms different from general-purpose computers (such as has been done with Playstation)

- net neutrality

- return to public sponsorship of development for standards in information processing and demand alignment to such standards in at least public tenders or beyond (such as in the construction industry)

- mandate E-commerce transactions be represented through standard, signed order and billing manifests (rather than allowing proprietary ad-hoc/pseudo currencies which would also be problematic for tax authorities) or create/mandate digital currencies

The challenges we're facing as civilization due to digitalisation aren't entirely new and have been addressed for eg the telco and financial industry. It's only in the last decade that we're being brainwashed to become slaves to "the Cloud".

There should also be a ban on IP holding companies - that is the scheme where big company creates a parent company in a tax haven that holds IP and then subsidiaries pay "license fees" to effectively remove as much of taxable revenue as possible thus getting competitive advantage over companies who pay right amount of taxes and not using any "tricks". Collection of personal data should also be restricted to only serve the purpose of the product and for legal reasons. For example a company providing email service should be forbidden from selling analytics data to advertising companies or to fuel their own ad services.

I can also see that companies should be required to release schematics of the products and documentation for any file formats etc. they use, so that when you save a project from a given program you should be able to convert it to another format. Companies should also be prohibited from using AI as customer services.

This is a fair comment, but its a bit out of context. The article is addressing the increasing power that software (tech) companies have in the manufacture and control of hardware.

But why is this a problem. In the past it was Intel and occasionally AMD or some of older x86 that fell by the wayside. PowerPC was there as well I suppose for awhile.

In many ways it's actually way more diverse now than it's ever been, just that some of these players are not making their innovations generally available but rather keeping them inhouse.

I feel the barrier has been high for quite some time, Intel was/is a monster that is occassionally caught napping. Maybe they'll wake up again and pull something big out of the hat, turn into a IAAS company as well maybe.

To be honest all of this seems like a reasonably decent competive market compared to the old days, we seem to have collectively forgotten the decades of wintel.

Problem is that when your M1 cpu goes bad, you cannot buy the chip from Apple to replace it (tools to do that are fairly inexpensive now and within hobbyist reach). Something like this should be regulated - companies should be required to provide spare parts for x period of time after product phase out. Companies should be forbidden from telling suppliers to not sell spare parts to 3rd parties. We need regulation for the right to repair.

Sure, but why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it, having the government mandate and tell you what's good for you helps no one in the long run.

The big companies have no real problem complying with the regulations, it's quite clear that consumers don't actually give a damn. All you've now succeeded in doing is making sure any startup has a tonne of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through to get it right.

What you need to do is identify where a transaction has not been made between two parties for fair recompense. One potential area is to say that without adequate repair cover you are now forced to dispose of your electronics and pay for the safety disposal so that it does not pollute the environment for everyone else. Then a consumer might see the need for repair rights and make an informed value decision.

Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical.

As an anecdotal example; circa 2011 the australian goverment brought in legislation to make portable A/C units more efficient. Great, right? Wrong, the government in it's infinite ineptitude managed to word so that it only effected dual vent portable A/C units and left single vent A/C units unaffected. Instead of making dual vents more energy efficient the companies pulled all dual vents from the market and now you can only get single vents which are woefully inefficient. This is not the companies faults, they did exactly what you would expect them to do. The government fixed the legislation 11 months ago but unfortunately we can still not get dual vent A/C at all in Australia.

Are you saying that being able to repair something independently for a consumer doesn't have value? If free market cannot solve the problem, then regulation is needed. You can see that market is moving towards non repairable single use devices or that they can be only repaired at a extortionate price by authorised repair shops. If there is no regulation, all companies will be moving into that direction chasing that extra profit and consumer will not be able to vote with their wallet if everyone does it. Your example is comparing apples to oranges. I am not saying that regulation should influence product design, but rather the producers should give access to spare parts and schematics. I agree that regulation like for A/C example isn't great.

He's saying that when consumers routinely buy products that need to be serviced by first parties, over devices that can be opened and repaired by the end user, the market is voicing its opinion on whether reparability has value to them.

I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head.

Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in?

It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up.

I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".

how about

$vendor shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to anybody

I think you’re misconstruing his points by bundling it with the overused interrogative of “are you saying...”, he is saying it has value if the people so decide. A government regulation forcing people to do something they already aren’t doing leads to the sort of didactic nonsense like running government sponsored commercials every 20 minutes telling you to wash your hands and use hot water to combat covid.

> why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it,

I would argue that a lot of consumers _do_ value it, but they don't know enough to ask about that up front.

Most people want to buy a thing, then use that thing, and when it breaks they reasonably assume that they should be able to get it fixed if they'd like. Cars work this way, appliances work this way, etc.

I think the reason why people don't ask for this up front is that

(1) most people would assume they have the right to repair (and thus don't think to ask) and/or

(2) life is short, and we shouldn't need an advanced degree specializing in a particular category of products in order to know all the ins and outs of buying one :)

> Sure, but why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it, having the government mandate and tell you what's good for you helps no one in the long run.

I don't think it's that simple at all. There are lots of small reasons people right now act the way they do which in the aggregate makes it look as though they don't value repairability. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer a world where repair was easy and cheap. It also doesn't mean that a world where repairs are easy and cheap isn't preferable to one where it isn't, in a bigger perspective (environmental, for one).

> Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical.

Hmmm... Ok... I think get it now! Regulations are always bad and never good. Wow, it's so simple. Thank you for this valuable and insightful information.

Because eventually all other values besides profit for 5 companies will be sacrificed if you go down that road.

Why do consumers need the government to enforce child labor laws? FDA regulation? OSHA? These lessons are written in blood.

Yes, you might need to work on the regulation in order to get it just right but "who cares, whatever" is not acceptable unless we want to live in an effectively-communist world with a few vertically-integrated corporations setting all the rules.

It would be great if every conversation about regulation on HN wasn't dominated by posts re-litigating if the concept of regulations should exist in the first place.

Agree with everything you said except for the fact that you seem to be using "communist" to mean "authoritarian/fascist."

A regulation to this effect has already been voted for in EU parliament just last week [1].

[1]: https://repair.eu/

fwiw not quite but we are on the right track

"The vote means that the European Commission now has the full support of the Parliament in moving forward with the development of laws [...]"

Interestingly enough, these contexts form (imo) an single example set.

Chip-OS dyads like wintel. Platforms duopolies & oligopolies. Neutrality & commodification vs lock-in dynamics. Public or free standards as an alternative to platforms. etc.

A lot of these dynamics have recognisably repeating in the computing industry (also telecom & media) for 4 decade.

OTOH, scale is a quality unto itself, and as this article suggests... Vertically integrated computing is very much a megacorp endeavour. I think the difference here is the scale of these companies.

The thing is that governments are generally influenced more by the commercial interests of large corporations and capital-owners, than by popular interests. There needs to be a very strong "pull", with a lot of organizing and pressure on politicians and agencies, to counteract corporate influence - and it's not enough that the reality is obvious.

Also, in most world states, large corporations are able to threaten leaving - stopping activity in the country - which can be quite a hit to the local economy for smaller states and larger corporations.

Another point which hinders your suggestions is the imbalance between world powers, especially the US (and to some extent the EU and China) - so that if one or several of those are beholden to corporate interests, then the others, or world-wide bodies, will find it very difficult to mandate things, apply taxation etc.

The elimination of corporations as special legal entities would make governments more directly controlled by people rather than wealthy megacorps. It is an unpopular line of thought because of the perceived economic benefits of megacorporations, but I'm not so sure they really are a good use of the talent that gets sucked up in them. Maybe we'd have a more innovative society if our culture took back personal responsibility.

> elimination of corporations as special legal entities would make governments more directly controlled by people rather than wealthy megacorps

Unlikely. Prior to incorporation, families were the operating unit of commercial and thus military and political activity. This pattern would resurrect itself: families, like corporations, can be immortal. That means they can plan and be trusted for the long term.

Note, too, that incorporation gives rise to charities, unions and independent lobbying groups like the Sierra Club. You lose those when you wipe out legal personhood.

Can you elaborate? Corporations are legal entities that aren't an individual or merely a group of individuals. Are you suggesting that corporations will be legally treated as the group of the shareholders? Something else? I'm not following.

Not sure I understand what you're saying in the last paragraph, but critique against lobbying definitely hits closer to home recently in EU at least; eg. just yesterday, French magazine Le Point has published a leaked Google memo detailing their strategy against new EU legislation [1]; paywalled, unfortunately, but [2] (in German) has some more details.

After all, politicians in democracies should be responsible to their electorate, shouldn't they?

[1]: https://www.lepoint.fr/high-tech-internet/exclusif-comment-g...

[2]: https://www.lobbycontrol.de/2020/11/mit-harten-bandagen-wie-...

> politicians in democracies should be responsible to their electorate, shouldn't they?

Unfortunately, I don't think we can say that they should.

I mean, in democratic ideology they should, but democratic state institutions, legal and organizational arrangements are not fashioned to achieve this outcome; and most democratic states were not, after all, created by the mass of people setting up those arrangements. Rather, elite groups and powerful interests set such states up, with democratic elections being a mechanism for legitimizing the new regime among the masses, or a concession to public pressure.

> Not sure I understand what you're saying in the last paragraph

If a big American corporation is transferring lots of money from Europe to America while engaging in some sketchy behaviour, Europe might be more enthusiastic about clamping down on that than America. For both financial reasons and due to different political priorities.

It's not like Europe could unilaterally reverse Google's purchase of Youtube or Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp.

I'm so glad this is the top comment.

Companies are for the benefit of people.

When companies become a detriment to public health and wellbeing they need to be regulated.

Bingo. We need standard communication protocols where the identity is separated from what is shared and so the platform is only a UI skin and users can easily swap. I.e. SMS for social media. Enforcement is an issue but only matters for market power of these large firms.

The new challenge is both parties, thanks to social media/news media reward mechanisms, cant agree to anything without loosing their behaviour conditioning like counts.

Until underlying reward mechanisms change political will won't have a chance to build.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com