Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Where's "convince government to build a moat around our industry" fall on your timeline?

That's the brown smear underlining the whole thing.

I don't think it appears on the timeline because it is something every company does when they get an opportunity. When a company had a chance 50 years ago to do it, they did it. When a company today gets a chance to do it, they do it.

That's not a step - it's whenever you are large enough or have the right connections to do that. I was talking about large trends of how capitalist thought in the USA is going.

And at this moment in time, the "best" strategy is to milk customers with recurring purchases. And it turns out the value-add didn't work. So feature-removal-and-sell-back recurring purchase is the current phase.

We're seeing that everywhere in IOT, gadgets, kitchen consumer gear, vehicles. Basically, it's the manufacturers exerting control post-purchase with the implicit threat that they can and will brick your stuff.

To put bluntly, we need government oversight over these realms. First-sale doctrine needs to cover "functionality sold at bill of sale". "No bundling" (of additional services that "complete" a thing) also needs to be strongly enforced. And if/when companies do stuff later and remove features (PS3 for an easy example), that they need to be dealt with as if a hacker did that - as C-level ordered felonies with prison, direct massive compensation to the wronged parties, and massive fines (company-ending if need be).

Still the devices I currently own are the best devices I ever had. And the services I subscribe to are incredible services that never even existed before.

Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.

What would change your mind?

Same things that would change anybody's mind: logical arguments and real-world examples.

Let me guess, there aren't any logical arguments, and no real-world examples that apply?

There are plenty of both but most are supporting my current beliefs, that is why I still have them.

I could just as well ask people who disagree with you and they would say the same thing, so that just says people find examples and arguments they already agree with. It's a bias indicator, which isn't really worth much.

Considering I'm not talking about you personally, nor do I know what things you personally have, that sort of dismissal is pretty pointless.

> Still the devices I currently own are the best devices I ever had.

"Own" - that's the key word here where the contention is. If the entity you bought this thing from still retains control over your thing, that's a rental.

> And the services I subscribe to are incredible services that never even existed before.

Considering you're not naming said "incredible services", it's irrelevant to dispute.

> Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.

Absolutely sure? That sounds extremely over-simplistic to reduce every possible legislation and governance down to "always sure government intervention worsens the situation".

And part of my recommendations are not needing new laws, but maintaining product truth-in-advertising in the face of remote access. And frankly, if I put in remote control, sold the machine, and then remotely destroyed it, I'd be brought in for felony hacking charges.

But really, the level of discourse of "guvernment baaaadddd" is damned distressing, and unfortunately a result of Reagan's very successful campaign to say that, defund public facing gov orgs, and then point at lack of performance for underfunded orgs, thus doing another round of underfunding.

>Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.

We don't live in anything remotely resembling a free market. Tens of thousands of pages of government regulations govern every facet of our commercial markets. The only question is how these regulations should be written.

IMHO a clear example of govt intervention being beneficial is the EU enforcing USB C for charging, and before that, USB for phones charging. Compared to the complete mess, inconvenience and waste of virtually every single model of phone requiring a proprietary charger.

But of course there are a zillion other examples, if you bother to look, it's just that those benefits disappear into the fabric of society.

To understand why you’re wrong ask yourself: would USB-C even exist if some global government would’ve succeed in mandating micro USB chargers as the EU tried in the past?! We’d all be stuck with the wold's worst connector.

Luckily usb c sucks less, but: What company will now have any reason to research a better connector to replace usb c when it’s not allowed to put it on the market?! Any innovation in this area was made illegal in the EU. Luckily we still have USA not yet succumbing to the madness.

These kinds of shortsighted decisions are why the EU stopped growing and innovating and started falling behind while becoming dependent on cheap Russian energy.

Even if well meaning and well written (two big ifs), the actual price of regulation is extremely high, it’s stagnation. But nobody realizes it because that lost opportunity cost forever disappears into the fabric of society…

nope.

Of course if you mandate a very narrow standard, completely inflexibly, you may have this kind of problem.

But from where I am, it looks like the 'swashbuckling free market' has stagnated due to monopoly power (Apple lightning), whereas the 'evil plodding government' has ensured compatibility, reduced waste, gauging, etc, while accommodating the incredible evolution of the USB standard.

The free market was doing just fine, thank you very much. It converged by itself into two pretty good standards (none of the previously EU-recommended micro-USB abomination) - one private one open but each having a big enough market to make sure there was very little of that much-pretended "waste". On the contrary - the e-waste next year when millions of Apple users have to throw away perfectly fine cables and charges will be absolutely gigantic.

Apple will have no problem complying as they already had a separate European nano SIM model. Or maybe they were ready to switch to USB-C anyway (a standard they helped develop), as they did with iPad Pros and MacBooks. While us users will swallow the cost as always while bitching about downgrading to USB-C.

But now innovation in this domain was made illegal. There is no way a company will invest in researching a new connector when they cannot legally bring it to the market. So Europe is becoming dependent on American creativity in yet another area. A small and maybe negligible one, of course, but this is a symptom of a larger disease: the EU is voting to mandate stagnation. And the worst part when outlawing innovation is this: you don't even know what you are missing. Because nobody is allowed to invent that future anymore.

If you wanna be really cynical, then thats not a step the company takes, politicians are quite willing to do it for them, and all by themselves.

There's a degree of symbiosis here. Politicians may be willing to seek such opportunities out on their own, because it helps their constituents (short-term, at the expense of others), or at least creates an appearance of it, which helps them and their party.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com