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Comment by arielweisberg | Hacker News Reader

As long as competition remains real I think there will always be a manufacturer or model that gives you close to what you want.

Mazda for example has stuck with physical controls and hasn't been making any noises about pushing a bunch of things behind a subscription. There is a subscription for remote start and some useless notifications, but at the moment it's nothing to worry about.

I don't think they can afford to do annoying things given their market share.

They are great cars and it's my preferred brand for sedans, hatchbacks, and SUVs with entry level luxury.

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Government regulation is still required. Relying on corporate goodwill is a fool’s errand, historically speaking.

Yes but who regulates the regulators? Google "regulatory capture". Democracies have a poor track record of controlling regulators who make subjective decisions.

There is a solution though: regulate size. It's objectively measurable. The Mazda example that GP gives is legit, but it's on the knife's edge of disappearing -- one more wave of consolidation and it will be gone. But of course regulating bigness is a very pre-2007 solution. In the modern world it's all about ever-increasing bigness. Because everybody loves zombie megacorps living off of an IV drip of cheap debt.

Citizens regulate the regulators.

You'd think that, but if citizens were capable of regulating anything, then they'd just directly avoid buying products with anti-features.

My average friend and family member is both well-educated and gives almost 0 effort to either (a) looking at what government regulators are doing or (b) researching their big purchases ahead of time.

>Democracies have a poor track record of controlling regulators who make subjective decisions.

I googled regulatory capture.

Let's look at a few things that have been regulated in the past 100 years of US history:

- car emissions

- lead usage in paint and fuel

- child toy safety

- food safety

- workplace safety

I'd say regulation has worked amazingly well since the days of Upton Sinclair novels.

Regulatory capture is the bathwater to the baby of regulation.

I would love it if I could count on my government to look beyond its own self interests here. But I can't. And I don't see this changing without some kind of harm impacting politicians at scale. It's sad that I have to hope for harm to come to my lawmakers but I don't see another way forward.

>As long as competition remains real I think there will always be a manufacturer or model that gives you close to what you want.

Like a 3.5mm heaphone jack, expandable storage, replaceable batteries & a physical keyboard on my smart(sic) phone?

Yes. https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-8110-4g

Serious and not serious at the same time. My point is that demand is what drives change in a free market, people chose phones without a headphone jack, expandable storage and replaceable batteries so companies chose to sell what consumers wanted, if the demand for these things were so large then more companies would be producing devices with those. Also remember sometimes what people say is not really what they believe or how they act. I know being a techie it's kind of hard to have perspective on it, but as far as I see most people don't give a flying ** about these things, even though I do heavily agree that they should :)

'Consumers' consume whatever is given, it seems. With the exception of the phys kb, each of those omissions lead directly to more control & revenue for the producer(s). Cheaper to build, as well. People did not "choose" to pay more for less, they take what is offered. When all/most manu's collude, it's not really a free marketplace, IMO.

I hope you're right, but the TV market gives me pause. There's plenty of competition, but all the major brands include advertising and spyware in their TVs.

Because most people don't think "is there spyware or adware on this smart TV" before they choose to buy one. In fact most people don't even really think a lot before buying a TV. This is the kind of thing that indeed regulation could be awesome, even though from a purely financial/objective point of view removing all of this would be kind of bad, I think it would be in the best interest of humanity.

Here's the problem: the same problem that caused consumers to not care about smart TV antifeatures in the first case (apathy) also causes them to not care about what their representatives are doing.

Because of this, any "regulation" that will actually happen is regulatory capture and/or performative regulation (there's probably a better term for this, but the idea is "regulation that looks good but doesn't actually do anything), because the citizens don't pay attention to these things, contact their representatives, or vote based on these issues, which is a necessary prerequisite for good regulation.

You can't spy if u don't have internet. I disabled internet (no router access) on all my smart TV's. So far they are working like a charm.

Huge Mazda fan here but I think this may be coming down the line for them as well because they are becoming more reliant on Toyota as they cannot afford to do an independent transition to EVs. As a result they have partnered with Toyota sharing ICE engine designs, cross shipping models(Toyota Yaris being a re-badged Mazda 2) and moving together (at a snails pace) towards a unified EV architecture. If Mazda starts sharing more components (like infotainment or designs for value added features like heated seats) then a subscription model might be coming there as well.

If their competition is able to lower their prices at point of sale due to increased subscription revenue, it's going to hurt Mazda's sales. If the subscription model is successful, I expect Mazda an other auto-makers to follow through.

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