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Comment by clickety_clack | Hacker News Reader

Yes it’s wild. Imagine if we decided that people can’t be relied on to install good locks for their doors, so we gave the government responsibility for locking and unlocking your door every time you wanted to leave your house.

A lid sensor is just so peripheral. Where do the vendor lock-ins end?

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Apple is a vendor, not a government.

A more accurate analogy, is like a lock installed on your door by a locksmith that uses proprietary parts available only through locksmiths. Which is exactly how a lot of locks work.

Proprietary technology exists in a lot of places, Apple didn't invent this.

> Apple is a vendor, not a government.

Apple is worse than a government. They have more money and reach than many governments and unlike many government officials, the public doesn't have the power to vote the heads of apple out of office or vote for who they want as a replacement.

Apple didn't invent proprietary technology, but they leverage the shit out of it in consumer hostile ways just to take even more money from people.

Governments have a monopoly on the use of force, and they exercise it to compel their citizens to do things whether or not they want to. For example, I have to pay taxes, and if I don't, they will use force against me.

Your relationship with Apple is very different. If you don't like Apple, you can just simply not buy or use their products. You have a choice and they have no way of compelling you otherwise.

The inability to use force doesn't make corporate power any less powerful--it only makes it a different kind of power. Yes, BigTech cannot arrest me or throw me in jail, but that doesn't mean that they don't wield other kinds of enormous power over my day-to-day life.

And unlike my (technically democratically elected government), corporations do not have to answer to the people they exert their power over.

I'm not trying to say that big tech doesn't have any sort of power at all that significant, of course they do. They certainly have a lot of control over information and how it shared. But I think that is unequivocally a lesser power than being able to imprison someone or put them to death. The fact that some small number of government officials are elected might be a rationale for that power, but it doesn't decrease it in any way.

The problem is that, with enough money, you can buy the people who have the power to imprison someone or worse.

Yea, that's a much better analogy. We don't want the lock vendor to decide how and when we lock our doors and how we fix them when they break. We don't want our stove vendor to decide what food we're allowed to cook, how many burners can be running at once, and what parts we use to repair it. We don't want our car manufacturer to decide where we can drive our car and who repairs it.

Yet, somehow, when it comes to technology products, we accept the manufacturer butting in to tell us how not to use them, and how not to repair them.

My stove, my car, and my locks are all opinionated in their design and use proprietary parts. None of them were designed to my personal requirements. Many of the products that I buy do in fact, not work exactly how I want them to, nor do they facilitate my desire to change them.

I can't name a single product in my house that uses any sort of open hardware design, except for the things, I've 3D printed or built myself.

A better analogue then would be that the developer who built your house insists on a specific type of lock.

There’s a whole repairability movement going on to maintain access to third party replacement parts for cars and appliances. This is a recent design choice that is being enforced by manufacturers. Historically, people have been able to repair everything they owned. Locking everything down is bad for consumers.

Developers normally do pick the parts that come on a house when they build it.

I understand arguments for repairability, and in most cases, I agree with them. But these things aren't boolean situations where things are either repairable or they are not. There's a lot of nuance in how things are designed and how repairable they are as an inherent part of that design. Ultimately, I agree that artificial lock-in for no reason other than that lock-in is a bad thing for consumers. But not everything is really that simple.

> Historically, people have been able to repair everything they owned.

It all depends on how you define "able". Most people lack technical ability to repair most things for thousands of years. And most things that you own today you are permitted to repair to the best of your ability.

I quite like this analogy, I hope I can remember it for the appropriate moment.

I dislike Apple's lock-in tactics, but I dislike gross fear-mongering exaggerations even more.

How'd we get to tyrannical government oversight from shitty corporate control? Sorry, I think I slipped on that slippery slope.

The better analogy would be "door lock vendor requires you to buy their door frame to make their door lock work with the security guarantees you chose to buy into."

Government should stay out of our private lives, but this kind of jumpy fear-mongering is what makes people lose focus, and when people are run by fear that's when the real psychopaths start taking advantage. Your fear mongering is creating the very government tyranny you're mongering about.

You mean like a prison?

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