Sorry, but I can’t get behind such a draconian government takeover of private corporations. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.
Support free products with your wallet instead of demanding that a the government coerce a private entity to make your arbitrary wishes and desires real.
A world controlled by a few giant conglomerates that own all of your data while providing the illusion of choice of "just don't buy it" is not a good outcome.
And yet corporations don’t exist to do your particular bidding and make your desires real. Unless a corporation is doing something illegal, you have no right to tell them what to do and what to make.
Apple could, for all intents and purposes, sell useless slabs of aluminum. Your demands to have the government coerce them into creating open APIs would be just as outrageous in this scenario.
Finally, giving the government this much power is shortsighted at best. Has the Trump administration not shown you the extremes the government can go to? The TikTok debacle after Trump’s Tulsa rally was ruined by it, calls to repeal Section 230, etc.
The government is not your friend and it never will be. There will always come a time when it will abuse its powers to the greatest extent possible. Unless corporations are actively and illegally harming consumers, I don’t see why your proposal is necessary.
Consider supporting companies that further your ideals with your own wallet rather than telling other companies what to do.
The idea that the government is going to create an open software utopia is hard to understand.
OK so we make it illegal. Governments are good at that.
I'm just a bit sick of the argument "It's OK if it is legal" when laws exist to serve us and can be changed. Discussion is the first step. My comment was a response to that.
Mandating right to repair and open platforms and formats (such as the circuit diagrams we used to get within our instruction manuals) would be one possibility.
This is not a realistic option.
This doesn’t make sense to me.
In your example, a company with trade secrets may want to (and be allowed to) keep circuit diagrams or charger designs secret in country A, but have to open them up to be allowed to sell in country B. It becomes a choice that carries a cost without a global mandate.
Exactly, legislation and legality is how we tell them what to do.
> Your demands to have the government coerce them into creating open APIs would be just as outrageous in this scenario.
I didn't demand govt-forced open APIs? Where did you come up with that? However right-to-repair and other freedoms and ownership over the hardware you purchase, especially when it's so critical to your life and centrally controlled, is worthwhile to pursue.
> "giving the government this much power is shortsighted at best"
Either the corporation or the government has the power. The challenge is finding the right balance, because neither should have complete authority.
What legislation do you propose?
> I didn't demand govt-forced open APIs? Where did you come up with that?
OP’s comment, which you seem to be arguing in favor of. Apologies if I misinterpreted.
> Either the corporation or the government has the power.
Obviously. So long as there are anti-monopolistic practices in place, you can choose the corporation you want to interface with easily. Nothing is stopping OP from buying an Android phone, PinePhone, or Purism Librem 5.
Governments are not something you can choose, not really, and giving them wholesale control of how corporations can create tech products is granting them an absurd level of power, especially when viable alternatives already exist on the free market.
Here's a question: Should the wireless networks that your phone requires to function follow net neutrality? Why or why not?
Like what the hell am I supposed to do on a purism libre that has 100x less apps of 1/10th the quality as iOS? It currently does not support signal, banking apps, maps, Spotify, slack, Feedly, pocket and millions more. Yes, a dev could potentially spend 100s of hours making shitty homegrown alternatives for every little app - this is a VERY long stretch. And even then 99% of people are not devs and will never ever ever do that. It’s like saying a horse is a viable alternative to a car. It’s not even in the same damn universe yet.
For the record, the Librem 5 does indeed support many of those apps via Anbox.
We also need to stop talking about individual purchasing decisions as if they represent the broader market. The point is not that there are zero competitors in a monopolised market. It’s that those competitors suffer at the will of the monopoly and cannot bring viable competing products to market. Hence all the competitors outside of the big two in the mobile space having effectively zero market share combined.
Far from forcing people to develop something anti-trust is design to increase competition by opening up the market. Offering more people the opportunity to build the innovative things they want and consumers the ability to choose. As we saw with the results in this happening to MS it works reasonably well.
Consumers have always come first, and they've already spoken.
Extremes are never good or useful. We need moderation. Capitalism with guardrails. We already have regulation to ensure certain corporate behaviors don't harm consumers, and even protect them from themselves, which has massively improved quality, safety and reliability of the things we buy.
Sure some regulations are overreaching or outdated, but the rise of giant software/internet companies has upended all of the old considerations of antitrust. There are a few trillion-dollar companies that impact a vast amount of our lives and there's no effective way to disengage from them while living in modern civilization. That's a major problem because pretty soon they will be the "government" that controls your life - but without any of the accountability or transparency.
My points apply to Apple as well, consumers wanted this and continued buying devices like this. I don't doubt that some people complain about various flaws in the products they buy but it's largely meaningless because they clearly don't care enough about these flaws to put their money where their mouth is. No one forced them to buy hard-to-repair, locked down Apple products when there were more open alternatives, they simply decided that repairability is so unimportant they'd still buy Apple products over a product that is more repairable.
It's one thing if Apple were dishonest or consumers were somehow forced to buy Apple, but they're not. There's nothing actually stopping consumers from buying the phone they want. Consumers aren't being harmed, they're getting what they really want.
This is the choice I lose with this: the ability to buy a product that is locked down and tightly integrated/controlled by Apple. It's a choice millions of consumers have already willingly made. I'm personally living happily without buying Apple's locked down products for myself, I and every other non-Apple consumer didn't need the government to make this choice for me. I don't want the government to remove a choice that millions of consumers have made on their own.
Sounds like the government should and did step in at the "until they couldn't" part, which is not where we're at. Hard to imagine someone unable to stop using Facebook or Instagram or whatever, there's a lot of social media out there.
> Railroads
Considering the US returned control of the railways to their original owners in 1920 and most rail today is privatized, I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
But even though it takes time to determine wrongdoing, we still prosecute crimes after they happen instead of before for obvious reasons. You wait until there is evidence of harm to consumers. Maybe the government has evidence, this is just an early article after all, but again, it's hard to imagine someone unable to stop using Facebook or Instagram or whatever, there's a lot of social media out there.
Instead of buying oil from jobbers, they made the jobbers’ profit by sending their own purchasing men into the oil region. In addition, they made their own sulfuric acid, their own barrels, their own lumber, their own wagons, and their own glue. They kept minute and accurate records of every item from rivets to barrel bungs. They built elaborate storage facilities near their refineries. Rockefeller bargained as shrewdly for crude as anyone before or since. And Sam Andrews coaxed more kerosene from a barrel of crude than could the competition. In addition, the Rockefeller firm put out the cleanest-burning kerosene, and managed to dispose of most of the residues like lubricating oil, paraffin, and vaseline at a profit.
Between 1870 and 1885 the price of refined kerosene dropped from 26 cents to 8 cents per gallon. In the same period, the Standard Oil Company reduced the [refining] costs per gallon from almost 3 cents in 1870 to 0.452 cents in 1885. Clearly, the firm was relatively efficient, and its efficiency was being translated to the consumer in the form of lower prices for a much improved product, and to the firm in the form of additional profits.
https://fee.org/articles/41-rockefellers-standard-oil-compan...
It is difficult to overstate how much Standard Oil revolutionized the oil refinement process, resulting in oil that was significantly cleaner and cheaper than its competitors’.
I often wonder if we would have gotten rid of things like lead and asbestos faster if consumers had to decide for themselves rather than depending upon regulators to determine what is safe.
The government's job here is to do that tedious research and ban/regulate anything that's hazardous to health and safety. The alternative would be a grassroots campaign by citizen experts who decide to go against the advice of what should be trusted sources, which is how you end up with stuff like the anti-vax movement.
If they're unaware of the negative effects of lead or a business is being dishonest about what's in the fuel, that definitely falls under unfair/dishonest practices and the government should prosecute that.
But how on earth is that relevant to Facebook or Apple antitrust? Facebook operates a bunch of websites that millions of people voluntarily sign up for and can leave at any time. The government isn't suing Facebook for safety issues or anything, they're suing them for antitrust which means they believe Facebook has somehow unfairly coerced consumers into using their product over their competitors.
Consumers really didn't like having lead in their gas or asbestos in their walls, the problem was that the dangerous effects of leaded gas and asbestos weren't well-known at the time.
Maybe you should elaborate on what you believe isn't well-known about Facebook that warrants an antitrust lawsuit.
For example:
iOS: Better for privacy than Android but less open to sideloaded apps
Android: Sends tons of data to Google about all kinds of things. Furthermore Google bricked one of my old Android phones by disabling the DNS for the authentication server so I could no longer sign into the phone. (It was too old to support Cyanogen).
Samsung: The last Samsung S-series smartphone in my house had apps pre-loaded on it including Blockbuster (it wasn't that many years ago) that could not be removed without loading new firmware or something. I guess Tizen is open source so theres that? But then again Samsung is one of the most cruel companies on Earth with a long track record of polluting, worker abuse, and blatantly copying others products and inside deals with the government to look the other way.
Microsoft: Abandoned the entire space. Was basically a copycat product with a UI based on squares anyway.
Essential Phone: Dead on arrival
Palm: Got left behind. Missed the whole app store wave
Blackberry: Wasn't really designed for non-business users with all kinds of upcharges for Blackberry data services. Missed the whole app store wave. Pivoted into automotive software after they couldn't keep up
So sure its easy to critique Apple for this or Google for that but ultimately what are the other options that can realistically compete with the above megacorps?
Not that I don't know how you feel, there are areas where I hate all the options too. I don't always get what I want, that's life. It would be perverse for me to force legions of others to dedicate their efforts towards what I would like instead.
I was responding to the other person's argument that you can simply not buy products like Apple's to show you don't like their lack of openness. My point was that all of the available products have different drawbacks so its not so simple as "don't buy Apple" when there are only a few options left from monopolies and they all have similar issues.
Well yeah. But yeah they control the market. So you buy the least evil product you can that is fairly priced and works with all your other stuff.
Or just blame the consumer cause they didn't choose the mythical Linux phone with great battery life and no spyware.
I'm not here to tell you that you should have just not bought X phone, I'm here to tell you that you have a choice as a consumer to buy what you want, and if you don't want anything available, that's not anyone's problem.
For millions of consumers, an Android phone or iPhone or Samsung phone is a great option and is largely what they really want. The phones that people buy today are phones that most people have repeatedly chosen over others, including some phones you may have liked. Sorry you don't like the current choices, society has never owed anyone a mythical Linux phone. If you want something that doesn't exist, make it yourself or convince other consumers to buy it as well so companies find it worth their while. Go buy Purism. Don't whine to the government that it's not fair you can't get a mythical Linux phone.
My point was that your claim to "just not buy it" doesn't work when its an essential item in modern society like food, water, housing, or a computer.
Its easy to sit here from your armchair and say "well if dumb consumers hadn't bought smartphones like this then we wouldn't have them so they shouldn't complain." But you, of course, have a smartphone from one of these manufacturers because like everyone else you realized you basically need one these days if you work or travel. We created rules that favor tech mega corps and now they dominate the industry.
So your "solution" isn't really a solution. You say people should have made some amazingly insightful decision to boycott all smartphones fifteen years ago but since they didn't we are stuck with the brands we have and its the consumers' fault...
Let me be clear: it's your problem to deal with as a minority consumer who apparently doesn't like anything most other consumers like. The tech world we live in today is the world that most consumers want and are happy with. You are stuck with the brands we have, the rest of the consumer market have bought the smartphones that they've happily, willingly and repeatedly chosen.
Whatever you may think of the tech industry, it very closely reflects what most consumers want. If you want something no one else wants, make it or evangelize, asking the government to forcibly change outcomes is awful.
Why is it so hard to understand?
I like my iPhone. I worked at Apple. I still recognize its limitations. I'm not going to go without a phone to make a point to a $2 trillion company.
I'm not saying I like what Apple does, but I do recognize that the majority of consumers want the sort of locked down experience that Apple provides.
I don't expect you to make a point to a trillion dollar company, I expect you to recognize that Apple became a trillion dollar company because consumers really want what they're making, as locked down as it is.
Its an Apple marketing point. Its not why people buy iPhones.
And it only matters when it's backed by a purchasing decision. Someone can swear up and down that they hate walled gardens a lot but words mean nothing; if they turn around and purchase an iPhone over the plenty of open alternatives, it only signals that either they don't know what a walled garden is or they care about other stuff far more. Actually paying money for something cuts through all the bullshit consumers say to their friends or the internet about what they really want and what their priorities are.
Markets don't give each individual consumer precisely what they want, they give large groups of consumers what they want weighted by consumer priorities. In that way, most consumers get what they really want. Obviously that means some consumers don't get what they want and perhaps that's you, I don't always get what I want either. But sorry, if most consumers really wanted a device without a walled garden, they wouldn't have willingly and repetitively bought iPhones over more open devices. If there were a large consumer group of people that really want a good device without a walled garden and are willing back up their desires by paying for one, businesses will be aching to take their money. In fact, there already are many open alternatives that serve these people well. According to you your iPhone has issues even though you own one, but evidently these issues are so minor that you won't even give alternatives your money to avoid them. "But I really don't like it" is worth as much as it cost to say that, which is absolutely nothing.
My iPhone has THOUSANDS of features. Battery life, interoperability with other devices, reliability, familiarity, particular apps that I’ve purchased already, and hundreds of other reasons all contribute to why I like one smartphone brand over another.
And yes access to third party apps is one of those thousands of contributing factors but ultimately I’m not going to buy a phone that has a crappy battery and doesn’t work with any of my other devices just so I can download a couple extra cool apps without the App Store. Besides I can jailbreak this iPhone (at a privacy risk since I have to flash the whole firmware) and run sideloaded apps if I want to but it’s usually not necessary.
So you keep equating making a choice based on thousands of variables with a large scale consumer endorsement of one particular variable which is not at all scientific or logical.
For the average consumer, the fact that they have $200 in iOS apps they’ve already purchased over the last decade and their entire family is on Macs and iPhones that have generally been reliable is enough reason to stay with another iPhone. They’re not thinking about walled gardens when they’ve probably never even realized the distinction.
There's only so many ways you can tell me you care so little about walled gardens that it ranks below about a thousand features that you actually base your purchasing decision on. Let me explain it very, very simply: I and many others actually give a shit about walled gardens, we actually make purchasing decisions based on that by not buying Apple. I personally refuse to buy Apple devices for myself that are incredibly locked down and limited and so intentionally incompatible with every other device on the market; Oh, that describes every single Apple device including the very first iPhones since before Apple became a trillion dollar company by selling a billion iPhones. You and millions of others could have made a similar decision but you didn't, you found about a thousand other things more important.
Over countless choices of countless combinations of thousands of features from companies all vying for more money and attention, consumers have consistently demonstrated that walled gardens are not just a very distant concern that they won't bother paying for, it's often a desirable choice and a top priority amongst many consumers who openly desire features & limitations that are only possible in Apple's locked down walled garden.
I don't think it's helpful to continue this conversation any further. I find your depiction of consumers to be hopelessly out of touch and I think it's kind of pathetic to claim that walled gardens are important yet find a thousand other reasons to ignore it. Every purchasing decision is a trade-off, not everyone gets literally every last thing their heart desires, nor should they because that's a waste of resources. Consumers get what they really want, the market has done well to ensure that, and evidently you've fulfilled your top thousand most desired features in a phone with Apple too.
Calling for the government to step in and override the choices of millions of consumers is the last thing I want, even if it runs contrary to my own consumer choices.
You care very strongly about the walled garden so much so that you’ll ignore thousands of other compromises compared to other devices that you may not like. That’s rare, but you’re on Hacker News so of course you aren’t like normal people when choosing a phone. You can’t assume most people will do what you do when they haven’t even heard of the walled garden issue so it literally could not be on their list of considerations.
I’m guessing I could say you don’t care about privacy or usability or something else based on your phone choice. But you’d say no I care about not having a wallet garden and thats why I chose it. Well in the same way most people didn’t choose to have a walled garden. They went to the store and bought one of the most popular phones and regardless of brand all their apps came from an App Store so they didn't even know the difference when they were deciding between other compromises like price, availability, network, battery life, ease of use, etc.
In fact, most these people never had an App Store before their iPhone so it seemed like an extra thing no one else had instead of a locked down Apple monopoly. Hindsight is 20/20.
None of these people would be upset if you put in a power user setting to allow third party apps. They wouldn’t even know it was there. So don’t say they “chose” that they didn’t want it. You can’t say people chose to ban something they don’t even know exists.
Of course it's rare to prioritize walled gardens, that's the point. That's why the industry is like this. No one really cares about walled gardens, they don't care about it enough for them to make any real decisions about it.
People don't go "I really want a walled garden", they just say "I really want a phone that does and chooses everything for me" and proceed to buy a locked down device that applies restrictions that are only possible in a locked down platform.
By the way, Android already does put in a power user setting to allow third party apps. They're still being sued by Epic, and Google believes that allowing third party stores are needed to resolve potential antitrust issues (Google has started working on this). I'd be very surprised if antitrust action doesn't tread similar ground with Apple, and you can bet that all the people who liked & supported Apple's iron fist are going to start complaining if a bunch of popular apps move to their own app stores to keep their revenue cut.
So you admit after all this my exact point in the first place. Almost nobody is deciding based on this because there are thousands of other things that are either more important, easier to understand, more talked about in marketing and reviews, or simply because they've never even heard that some are walled gardens and some aren't. Clearly someone who has never had a smartphone before wouldn't choose based on specifics of the App Store when they're probably trying to figure out how to make a phone call.
"Walled garden" is just some jargon that some of us use to describe this kind of platform. Consumers have long been familiar with the concept of a platform that is locked down and makes decisions for you. "Walled garden" isn't a magic phrase that one needs to utter in order to want.
No, people DO want phones like that. You are in a niche group of users that don’t want it. Most iPhone users and even many developers love the walled garden and the security and quality it brings with it.
There is no choice and the markets for highly sophisticated technologies are not free or efficient. It's farcical.
There is plenty of choice, many of which I'm happy with and many of which I'm not. I think it's farcical to say that there is no choice, millions of consumers have chosen freely without coercion from many options. The choices we have today are options that consumers have chosen willingly and repeatedly over other options that no longer exist.
No one can come first. If the terms aren’t mutually agreeable, the other will not participate in a transaction. They don’t have to make things to sell you just like you don’t have to buy from them. It can’t work any other way.
Free markets and capitalism are great, the best system we have, but there are still guardrails to ensure proper behavior and mitigate harm. This is the problem being discussed. The balance in recent times is completely off with these massive software/internet companies that control so much of our lives with little oversight or accountability. This is what people are arguing against, and I believe you would agree with that.
This isn't a draconian government takeover. It's to prevent a company, of all things, becoming more powerful than many governments in the world. Companies have no allegiance to the people and must be checked.
> Support free products with your wallet instead
That's not how society works. Humans can be abused and manipulated and deceived. I have seen scenarios in which Apple was a customer of another company. Apple was incredibly abusive in many ways, and this was toward a billion dollar plus company. How do you think Apple treats or cares about others, including its own customers?
The same right that literally every other private entity has to use their existing wealth and power to gain more?
> This isn't a draconian government takeover.
Oh, for all intents and purposes it absolutely is - you are giving the government enough power to corral and coerce corporations into doing their bidding. See the ridiculously unethical actions the Trump administration is taking against TikTok after they ruined his Tulsa rally, for example.
> Companies have no allegiance to the people and must be checked.
And governments do? Governments abuse their power to the maximum extent legally possible all the time. Often, they go further. A cursory reading of United States history will show you that the government is not your friend, it never was, and at every moment possible it is also vying for more power, more control, more surveillance.
As long as Apple has not turned into a monopoly there isn’t really a concern here. There is an available market for the products you want. Just because they are not as capable as the ones Apple makes, does not mean you get to coerce Apple into doing your bidding.
> > Support free products with your wallet instead
> That's not how society works.
But it is. There is a flourishing community around libre products. The PinePhone has been a hit. There are large communities around reasonably open Android phones.
I don't, but the government does if they are doing so in a harmful way that violates laws and agreements.
> Why do you think you can dictate who can buy and sell from who, especially on the basis that they are somehow too good at it?
Again, I don't think anything of the sort. I didn't say that. And they aren't being punished for being "too good" at what they do. They are, or will hopefully be, punished because they are good but then they abused that to be even better. It's the abuse that's the problem.
Further, pushing responsibility onto individual consumers to (somehow) shape the market "with their wallet" is absurd. The highest purpose of a public government is that it can serve to protect the common folk from the abuses of concentrated wealth. Asking regulators to do their job isn't coercive, it's corrective.
Government has been intervening (in some industries) in these ways for decades. It works. It's not arbitrary.
It's not perfect of course, but it's far better than allowing large companies to get a complete stranglehold.
It seems to me that if you want to claim some version of "leave the marketplace alone and it will self correct" then you have to make a pretty strong case. It's not a self evident truth, history tells a different story.
Sometimes the marketplace takes care of itself, sure, but there have been lots of examples where it hasn't. In those cases, when government has stepped in, the outcome has generally been positive (if sometimes short lived).
Think for example about regulations regarding cellphone number portability. They supported porting a phone number to switch providers fostered competition and lowered cellphone rates. (not perfect, but much better than before)
Without that regulation new or smaller companies - even those providing better service or lower rates - could not get customers because of simple shenanigans.
(Is Purism really even shipping? I ordered in 2017 and haven't gotten mine)
Because I don't want to spend twice the price of an iphone for something less useful than a flip phone. Freedom preserving devices will always struggle to reach the level of usability of the first iphone.
That’s just life. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. I want my phone to be a toaster - I have as much right as you do to make Apple implement what I want - that is to say, no right at all.
The government is a powerful tool for improving the world when applied correctly.
It's not a takeover, it's a break up of business units.
When these units operate together, they enable a kind of power otherwise unachievable.
Carriers and Mobile device makers play incredibly anti-competitive games all the time in the fight for market share.
It's almost surreal. The carriers were pretty bad before smartphones, now it's Android+iOS.
Large entities can play all sorts of games like forcing their buyers into exclusivity, requiring them to not carry competitive devices all sorts of things.
Microsoft is a classic example with Office: they can integrate their software into their OS in a manner they don't afford to competitors, thereby leveraging their OS monopoly, into other monopolies, which in the long run is bad for business.
Platforms have an inherent aspect to them which makes us want to have fewer players, but there still should be more diversity.
Remember feature phones? There were plenty of choices. And buying one, did not lock you into the next one. They were not 'platforms' there were 1000 varieties even if there were some 'big players' (ie Nokia).
There are actually some consumer benefits when vertical integration is done well, and there is pricing competition - which is why I think that the desktop market is fair.
Apple is being a 'good capitalist' on the Mac side - great innovation - and choice.
The issue with Facebook is an entirely different issue, I don't even think it's one of 'anti competitive' behaviour - the real issue is a little bit political and it's about the control of information, liability, content filtering, 'truth' etc.. That's where that discussion is focused.
If I were 'Capitalist God' I wouldn't break up Apple but I would force them to allow open distribution of apps, while allowing certain measures for security, and of course, transportability of personal data from all apps, all vendors, including Apple. Similarly to Google with their services and Android.
With Facebook and content, requiring them to have a completely independant panel for content filtering, with some kind of objective oversight (like a board, but not corporate), where FB gets to set pretty much any policy they want, but that Board/Panel ensures that there's fair and consistent application of those policies to the content.
Much like Banks are regulated: they have to have 'firewalls' between their buy and sell side operations to avoid conflict of interest.
Finally, some rules about channel ownership and exclusivity - so that Apple/Android can't join in with AT&T/Verizon to basically cut every little other vendor in the world out.
Honestly, what I just described just as an example is not deeply interventional, and it would allow those businesses to thrive mostly the same while giving users more choice, privacy, allow business to set their own content guidelines and wash their hands of politicians thinking 'their party is treated unfairly' because it's literally and independent body doing the filtering equitably, and it would let smaller players with actually decent products into the playing field.