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Comment by rustcleaner | Hacker News Reader

I always said a hefty sales tax (50%? 100%? 200%?) on final sale of any product containing just a single Universal Machine which has artificial designs/locks that prevent the owner from replacing any and all firmware/software with versions he has authored, and/or which lacks complete enough documentation of design and interfaces that would enable a knowledgable and capable owner to author his own software/firmware. This should apply to PCs, phones, watches, microwaves, televisions, CPAP machines, automobiles, toasters... everything which contains a Universal Machine. Uncontrolled [by owner] Universal Machines are a national security concern which has the potential to turn grave at any moment.

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A "tax" like this is essentially equivalent to a fine, and a fine is a price

Also, companies can just price the additional cost in, blame the government for the price increase, and mislead consumers about the tradeoff being made. A ban is harder to do that about

Yep and you can come in and make a fully open and compliant competitor product, because your closed and uncompliant incombent is forced to charge a price which should give you enough margin to succeed.

I am admitting that yes closed beats open at money extraction/harvesting from customers, which is why you only ever see closed hardware. The whole idea is to kneecap business models which depend on handcuffing owners with digital locks. This is economic lawfare, I am not hiding that. We The People are not animals on a farm to harvest dollars from occasionally, as if they were milk and methane.

Yea but you know what's even better than a tax? Not being able to release those products onto the market. I really doubt products whose "value-add" is lock-in would be able to survive black-market dynamics. But Apple, Google, Microsoft, John Deere, what have you can totally afford extra taxes, and they probably even have the market power to just foist those increases on their customer base and not lose them because they're effectively a captive market in the current regulatory regime, and that's also the kind of market power that makes it so that you don't have to compete on price. I consistently can get cheaper laptops by seeking out ones that don't include windows licenses, but this clearly hasn't affected the laptop market much

Also, let's say I'm gonna undercut someone on price for electronic devices. Unless I'm starting from a place of great personal wealth and don't take any capital at all, this needs investment, which means that an obvious solution to any scenario in which I'm meaningfully harming the bottom line of one of these incumbents could just be buy it out from under me, which is indeed how this generally plays out in the real world

If we are serious about regulating monopolies, we have to understand that remedies that rely on raising operating costs are simply always going to be ineffective

Why not just prohibiting the practice? This isn't weed or alcohol.

Still allow for the multimillion dollar industrial dozen-megamachine makers.

So the idea is to ban the practice for smaller players without the scale to eat the costs?

No thanks, an outright ban is necessary. This will not prevent manufacturers from doing business no matter how they may whine about it, and frankly if this does somehow kill their business it should

The idea is to make it almost completely commercially unviable to sell locked down DRM hardware to small players, and only somewhat harder for XYZ Healthcare to buy the multimillion dollar GE MRI machine unless the MRI is fully open and compliant (XYZ can borrow and amortize, but Joe can't do that to buy playstations and cars).

Wait so you're saying that it's important to allow predatory business models to continue in the industries that do the most harm through constant consolidation to support ballooning costs?

Like the healthcare system's consolidation and scale that allows it to deal with massive extra costs and the degree to which that system is beholden to predatory technological models is if anything a great motivating example for the potential benefits of a ban

And of course, Joe then foots 2x the bill (denied by insurance, 'natch) when he is brought in to XYZ Healthcare managed hospital for a brain scan

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