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Comment by temac | Hacker News Reader

The problem could be abuse of a dominant position. Maybe Mac has now a market share good enough so that MS can pretend they are not in a dominant position in this sector, although if all it takes for an industry to abuse their users is that they all commit it together, each with their still high market share, that would also be an issue for citizens. Esp. in duopoly cases.

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But again, why should the government regulate this? We don't have a fundamental right to own and use computers, or to offline accounts for our computers.

What legal line could be drawn to allow the government to regulate this without regulating all kinds of product and business decisions? Would it be reasonable for them to regulate what colors of crayons must be included in ever box of Crayola crayons? And if not, what is the legal boundry allowing them to say what features an OS has without allowing the crayon regulation?

Yeah, I used to be a libertarian too, and heavily invested, and the thing is that someone will do a bad thing with the law eventually, so you may as well do good things with the law instead of cucking out because bad things will be done wheter you do good things or not.

I don't actually consider myself a libertarian, I just generally haven't found big governments to be the best solution long term and would rather see them treated as a last resort.

Its not about doing good or bad things, and I don't see myself as having cucked out either. Someone will do what I consider a bad thing whether or not there are laws saying they shouldn't. And ultimately, who am I to say what they can't do as long as it isn't stepping on anyone else's rights?

In this more specific topic, I don't like how Microsoft has been setting any semblance of privacy on fire but I also don't see why I would need the government to fix that. Consumers have other choices, and if people care enough it will hit Microsoft's bottom dollar. With regards to Teams, I have actually been on teams where that tool was so broadly hated that they wouldn't use it whether free or not. If Microsoft was somehow blocking other chat apps on Windows that'd be a whole other ball game.

Why does something need to be a "fundamental right" to be worth protecting? Huge swathes of the population have been using operating systems on personal computers mostly the same for thirty years. How does it benefit society for one or two companies to build a moat then go to the casino and bet the entire industry on black?

Microsoft isn't Uber. Their moat is decades of work on kernels, drivers and backwards compatibility that can't be replicated overnight by a competitor. If they self-immolate to chase some idiotic AI/cloud fad, that does a large amount of real economic damage.

I don't even know if I want any regulations in the tech industry, especially after all the e2e encryption bullshit everyone (especially my country's government) is trying to pull. But if I did, this would be right at the top of the list for risk/reward. If cloud sync and AI are so good then sell cloud sync and AI, don't risk established markets to try and flog it off on people that don't want it with dark patterns.

It doesn't have to be a fundamental right, that's just roughly where I have found the line to be for me. There are always exceptions and I'm sure there are things I think are worth protecting, but I do keep a pretty high bar.

I don't see something like an operating system nearly on the level of worth protecting for a couple reasons. Humans can live just fine without operating systems and computers, and we can certainly live with or without support for local accounts. Additionally, there are other operating systems to choose so even if that's a red line for someone consumers still have options.

I can say I'd have less opposition to such specific laws if they came with an expiration date. At least in the US we don't do that and we end up with an ever growing list of laws that are either irrelevant or out of touch with future generations' morales or ethics.

"we don't have a fundamental right to own and use computers." - 15 years ago, I would probably have agreed with this statement. But in the modern technological world, without access to computers you are unable to engage with a large number of services, both private and public services.

So as a citizen, it is your right to access publicly funded services, right? So then by extension, the tools to access those services should be a fundamental right in a modern technological society. And moreso, you should have the right to own those tools outright without molestation by large corporate entities... Fuck, Microsoft isn't even a large corporation... It is a behemoth, 3.3 Trillion market cap! I think they, and their competitors, could stand to be saddled with some more regulation to insure a baseline OS for the citizenry of this county, and other countries. It's not like it's going to hurt their profit margins that much to comply!

> Fuck, Microsoft isn't even a large corporation... It is a behemoth, 3.3 Trillion market cap

Hah, well I'm definitely on the same page with this part! Companies shouldn't be given such massive legal cover that they can accumulate this level of wealth and power.

That said, I'm still not so sure I agree with computers being a fundamental right. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and for something fundamental it really should be something that can't be taken from you, aka inalienable rights in my opinion. Life in the US is certainly harder without a computer today, but is it really a right that needs to be legally enshrined?

Would this logic extend similarly to cars, phones, or air conditioning? They're all in the category of items I think everyone ought to have access to, but I don't think they're so fundamental to human life that governments must enforce that access.

I'm big on small governments in general though. I may just be seeing slippery slope here when that isn't warranted.

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