If Facebook wants to make a VR headset that requires that you upload a monthly video of you doing the chicken dance, just don’t buy their product.
Attempting to use government to make private entities build the kinds of technology you like is a pretty heavy hammer to drop on individual freedoms.
It is not. They used their money and power to hire some of the brightest minds in VR to design hardware and to create exclusivity deals with some of the best developers. I either take facebook's offering or I don't have access to those things at all.
> With the government you have no room for flexibility.
You do. You can "say bye!" as you phrased it and move to another place with a another government. I've done it several times now.
In certain circumstances, we already do (kind of): FRAND licensing for technical standards are a good example.
>[...] (FRAND) terms, denote a voluntary licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard.
For example, when AT&T owned all the telecoms equipment in the US, other companies couldn't make new products using their system (like answering machines or modems). Having anyone able to design, connect, use and sell new devices on top of their infrastructure is an incredibly important feature.
And facebook knows that. They launched facebook on the internet (which is an open platform). Facebook couldn't have been created in the first place if not for that.
Facebook owes its existence to open platforms. Lets not allow the train of innovation to stop here.
Same as you are not forced to use facebook.
This isn't you making a free decision between competitors, like in an idealized econ 101 example. Facebook has already used its money to consolidate its grasp on the standalone VR market - can you think of a viable competitor to an Oculus Quest? Should people just have to put up with privacy abuses or be excluded from VR altogether?
When the market fails, it's time for the government to step in.
Taking your argument to the extreme if you don't like coal perhaps you should avoid buying electricity. Good luck with that in the real world of today
That works in theory, but in practice when all the products from all the vendors work that way, you no longer have a choice.
Plenty of examples like that - Try buying a TV that's not a "smart" TV nowdays, you basically can't. If you want a good quality picture, then it's also coming with telemetry and in many cases advertisements, too.
Another less known example could be Kolor, the maker of Autopano Giga (IMHO the best panorama creation tool so far) being gobbled by GoPro, likely for the talent, then shut down without replacement.
I see these contradictory narratives on HN.
Of course you do. HN (or any platform) is not a monolith with a single opinion. I see this argument all the time, and it baffles me
FB is banking heavily that VR will become a necessity, to one extent or another. I sincerely hope FB fails, but my suspicion is that it would fail not because FB failed, but rather because VR itself failed (e.g. Google Glass for consumers). Still to be seen.
Electrical service has limitations around things like termination of service / fair pricing / safety, but we don’t mandate how they design their software and servers.
I mean, we can mandate minimum services. Something that has a webbrowser, email client, texts and calls. If you want to say that apps don't fit into that, I suppose that works.
Humans are dumb and they buy it, and it sets the precedent. We have to make laws sometimes. You can barely even buy a TV without smart features now and yet everyone that knows about such features that don't want them still HAVE to buy them if they want a gd tv.
Should we just make it legal for oil companies to have no consequences for oil spills because it doesn't really affect much, we can just stop eating fish in the sea. There's still plenty of food elsewhere.
Oil spills harm the environment. We regulate them because the ocean can’t just choose to not receive the oil, not out of a desire to make sure we can keep eating fish.
EDIT: To say the thing out loud: I buy smart TVs on purpose, and I’d like to think I’m a smart person who understands the technology involved. Is the case you’re making that I am in fact dumb?
I mean go and look at the other HN thread on 100K US deaths per year on plastic. I mean I bought plastic today and highly likely will do so again tomorrow.
It's a different story if it's eg. an Alexa device thats primary purpose is to be connected to the internet.
If a device is in a class of product that doesn't necessarily need a cloud connection/account/whatever, it shouldn't require it.
Often it's not practical to switch to a competing product. Sometimes it's not possible at all. Consumers should have rights here, and it's legislation's job to provide them, in a just society.
Now, if you want to take a screwdriver and serial cable to the tractor and hack the crap out it, and you manage to bypass the requirement, have at it. You own the tractor. They can feel free to void your warranty / not give you updates, but you can do whatever you want with your property.
But to buy a device that says “internet connection required” and then be angry when it requires an internet connection doesn’t make sense to me, nor does asking the government to mandate the business model used by tractor (or VR headset) manufacturers.
Companies have determined that's what they're going to offer the customer and they'll brick any attempts at modifying the hardware. They're making money refining their AI and selling off customer data, so why not?
You need the high end tractors because they're the only machines that meet the requirements of what you're doing.
This is what the legislation folks want to stave off. It's in a similar vein to the right to repair movement (which is dealing with similar restrictions right now, in the real world - see John Deere tractors).
I appreciate that folks in this thread are attempting to propose legislation to stave off behavior they believe is dangerous. My concern is that using legislation in this way has knock on effects that make free society radically worse, because at its core it requires being OK with using government to restrict what technology combinations are legal to bring to market.
For instance most people don't know what is an acceptable level for various pollutants in drinking water. As such if there was no government oversight most people would be happy drinking poluted water and the few that care wouldn't be serviced as the cost of cleaning water for a niche wouldn't make it profitable. But hopefully we have laws that dictate safe levels and vendors have to respect them.
For hardware it's the same, experts are pretty clear about the risks: at the most basic level if hardware stop to function when some server crash then the whole society becomes dependant on this and as such any outages starts to have catastrophic consequences by domino effect. On the spying activity linked to those accounts the risk is pretty clear as well: it opens people to leaks of intimate details about their life to Facebook employees and various hackers in case of failure.
So it seems clear that public safety would require making those two activities illegal.
This is, of course, fraud. Why doesn't current law apply? I think it does. But courts are funny: when fraud becomes common and accepted, and people cease to recognize it as fraud, it becomes acceptable. In those cases, a new law is reasonable.
If the pitch here was that vendors were lying about cloud/connectivity requirements, and we wanted legislation to prevent them from obscuring the truth, I’d be 100% down. Thankfully, we already have those laws.
The IKEA bookshelf doesn't violate your privacy nor have an always on connection to a much more powerful entity always looking to make another buck.
The IKEA bookshelf isn't an avenue for your attention and your time - whereas things like gambling (considered addictive and regulated by almost everyone) are - and we regulate them heavily.
Why would Facebook with its billions be exempt from regulation? It's not something we "want" - its to make their product basically useful without the IKEA subscription service to make sure your shelf doesn't fall apart every month.
Along the same lines, the law should say Facebook can't sell hardware that forces you to give up all your privacy to protect the individual.
This is not "I want Facebook to design a headset with blue stripes", this is "I don't want to be forced to give up my private data to use a product that would work just fine without".
I think the difference between the two should be obvious.
Allowing tones of resources and brains to be dumped into the advertising industry is a pretty terrible use of what we usually call a "society".
Yes, I do think groups should not have rights individuals have. It's more about the scale than the amount of people, and the line between that gets blurred when an individual can control thousands of PCs.
I suppose, I don't think the line between groups and individuals is quite so clear. When does a group become "greater" than the individual in a way that requires the individual to give up certain rights?
[0] This phenomenom is inherent to and a natural byproduct of a free market, which is why regulation and laws are essential to keep some sort of balance.
What alternatives are even available for standalone VR? Vive has something that's about 4x the price...
All-consuming capitalism isn't a public liberty, and if companies are in the mind of lowering costs by using cancer-inducing materials, slave work, corruption or indeed trading people's very identities, then it's in the purview of political institutions to intervene.
Some of the strictest privacy laws existed in Germany for a reason, because the country new what an SS or a Stasi would do with the data once it gets its hands on it.
Some of the laxest privacy laws are in the US, the country whose businesses supplied the SS[1] and nowadays the CCP[2] with surveillance technology to facilitate genocide.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
[2]https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/us-tech-products-080...