Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

Google now pulls the rug on Android which is a whole different story because it used to be open. The whole idea of Android was to be open.

I think with Apple in particular, this is the issue. Apple have largely demonstrated that they _do_ often have the users best interests in mind (or at least at some point have had) on the basis that the users are Apple’s primary customers. Yes, Apple lock down iOS functionality but this has often been to deliver innovative features. Users don’t mind that they’re in a walled garden because, they like the walled garden.

This is where Google is a different case. Google’s interests are aligned with mass data collection rather than products people love. Most Google users have experienced how this impacts them negatively at some point, usually with the degradation of their products, and constant advert spam.

Google is an example of a company that the mass majority assumes to be in the wrong. Apple often isn’t.

With Apple customers, a better argument to make is to say that Apple applies a 30% 'tax' on all activity on their phones. That they are being forced to pay more compared to non Apple users in spite of having bought their device fair and square.

The solution should be to provide the tools necessary to preserve as much agency using technology to people who want to. You should also keep in mind the middle tier technical people who need a bit of hand holding. But do not waste your time on the general public because they don't share or comprehend your goals.

Apple ran a very successful propaganda campaign where they portray themselves as the protectors and enforcers of a secure environment where users are safe from attacks from the wild internet. See Apple's spin on blocking cookies. Therefore, users of Apple products are conditioned to believe these measures exist for their own personal benefit, unlike Google which is presumed to be motivated to abuse your trust.

But the “good” king never lasts. They’re always eventually replaced by a despot, and all the power you ceded to the “good” king falls into the hands of the bad king. Which is why ceding that power is a bad idea, and kings are a terrible system of government.

Honestly, I can totally see where the cynicism is coming from, however if you think about it, that's a pretty condescending view. This effort might be Sisyphean, but things are not as dire as you might think.

People are already seething at how much their lives are being enshitified by Big Co. Even if 10% of voters reach out to their representatives, it would be a tidal wave. Politicians are terrified of the popular will and this is not a hill they are willing to die on. Just see the success of the right to repair movement as an example.

It is absolutely not. Awareness is what people need right now because nobody is saying anything different then the established line. The more people that put there voice into this, the better off we are going to be.

I'm hosting a Surveillance Capitalism Presentation soon that I designed myself, I'll likely post it on the net when I am done. If you are interested in hosting a zoom call or an in person awareness campaign like this. Email me from my website[0] campaign form[1] and ill notify you when its online and you can download it and use it yourself to host your own venue.

[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/forms/form-contact-campaign/

Sadly much as I agree with OP, the reality is there are a lot of evil people, and some of them lead a country and thus have vast resources to attack with. We need to solve this problem, not just cry about what a few of us are losing.

There is no shortage of well informed advocates of freedom. The question is, which forum should they discuss this in? There is no meaningful forum for such a debate which will have any real effect on policy and that's by design.

The only place that can both debate and effect policy changes in the legislature and politicians will never take the people's side against corporations on an issue until they fear losing reelection.

Hence the ask to educate the people around you and to encourage them to reach out to their representatives.

Perhaps some people were just conditioned to believe that these shackles are forced upon them for their own good, because only bad people would ever want to take them off.

e.g. Without proper regulations, your maintenance can become nearly impossible.

I was referring to the static private key that is stored in the silicon. At any time an application can initiate a license request process using DRM APIs which will elicit an unchangeable HWID from your device. The only protection is that it will be encrypted for an authorized license server private key so collusion may be required (intel agencies almost certainly sourced 'authorized' private keys for themselves). Google or Apple also has the option to authorize keys for themselves. In 'theory' all such keys should be stored in "trusted execution environments" on license servers and not divulge client identities for whatever that's worth: <https://tee.fail>.

I remember the WEI apologists trying to do the same thing to derail the argument. The problem is the goal, not the details. Just say no: DO NOT WANT!

If all the internet was is static content, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But we live in world where packets coming to your service result in significant state changes to your database (such as user generated content).

I suspect that we are currently in the valley of do-something-about-it on the graph which is why you see all this angst from the big players. Would Google really care if automated programs were so good that they were approximating real humans to such an extent that absolutely no one can tell? I suspect they would not only be happy with such a state of affairs, they would join in.

Hardware attestation often also has problems of centralization, but that's something else as well.

By just labeling it as an abstract bad thing without seeing nuance, I'm afraid you won't be convincing those in power to pass or block these laws, or those convincing your fellow voters which efforts to support.

If your answer is “they shouldn’t ever do that”, then you’re promoting an uncompromising position that governments are disinclined to adopt, being the primary user of identity issuance and verification on behalf of their citizens.

If your answer is “they should do that differently”, then you have a discussion about (for example) ZKP or biosigs or etc., such as the thread you’re replying to.

Which of these two paths are you here to discuss? I want to be sure I’ve correctly understood you to be arguing for the former in a thread about the latter.

But once you get the response you can unblind the signed signature and obtain the token (which is just the unblinded signature). This token can then be used once either because its blacklisted after use (and it expires before the next day starts for example).

The desired property of blind signatures is that given a token it's information theoretically impossible to determine which blinded signature it came from (because it could have come from any of them) even if the cryptographic primitive is broken by a mathematical breakthrough or a quantum computer. There is technically the danger that if the anonymity set is too small and all the other participants collude you can be singled out.

Correlating times is a threat vector that needs to be managed either by delaying actions (not tolerable by normal users) or by acquiring tokens automatically and storing them in expectation. Or something other I haven't thought of probably. There is also a networking aspect to this, you will need a decentralized relay server network that masks origin of requests.

You can make variations on this for a wide spectrum of rate limiting behaviors.

But also I agree with xinayder's comment-- the anticompetative, anti-privacy, invasive surveillance is unacceptable. There is a lot of risks with ZKP's that we just make the poison a little less bitter with the end result being more harm to humanity.

I think ZKP systems are intellectually interesting and their lack of use helps make it more clear that the surveillance is really the point of these schemes, not security because most of the security (or more of it) could be achieved without most of the surveillance.

But allowing the apple google duoopoly to control who can read online is wrong even if they did it in a way that better preserved privacy.

And because I can't believe no one else in the thread has linked to it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Constructions like this exist for many years. E.g. semaphore RLN (rate limiting nullifier). This particular construction was found unfeasible 7 years ago, but since then zksnark tech made huge progress and it is way cheaper now.

However if someone extracts a key and keeps it private, and instead gives out unblinded tokens there is nothing you can do other than rate limit - realistically, an adversary is going to trial different rates anyway to figure out which don't make them an outlier.

...no? Maybe this is true of end-user device attestation. But there are other use-cases for attestation.

Server device attestation is an entirely different thing. It's used in e.g. IaaS "Confidential VM" offerings, where the audience for the attestation information is the customer, rather than the server host. It's a very pro-privacy / pro-data-sovereignty feature.

And while embedded device attestation is sometimes about preventing customers from tampering with IoT stuff you "sold" them, more often it's about being able to trust and confidently assert that e.g. the climate sensors you've deployed all over a forest as part of a research project haven't been fucked with to report false data by someone with an agenda. (Or to "apply denial" to your unmanned military satellite downlink station the moment you detect that there's some unknown person out there futzing with it.)

I don't think those are the same people. I, for one, will continue this fight by telling everyone I know about the fact that Google is going for absolute control of the Internet, and by extension, everyone's lives. They have already become an unelected global government.

I -- literally -- do not care about a single "account" in any "service" I use aside from my email and bank account. Most people would add a few social media accounts to that list.

You don't need a "place to put secrets". Your iPhone app does not do anything important enough to require a "trusted chain" of cryptographic bullshit, just use a password and Google/Apple login.

Does it? Why waste time on developing exploits when you can just call up grandma and get her give you the money by her "own" volition - using her secure device - by pretending to be the bank/IRS/her grand daughter using AI voice/etc.

TPMs are a fucking mess. TPM 2 at least, I’ve worked with it for a few months. I love me some hardware security module, but I want to control it. And if it must be a standard, please please to something like the TKey, so it can be both much simpler than current ad-hoc standards and future proof.

https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/hsm-done-right

The problem lies in companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft rejecting attestation that they do not control.

People confusing big tech's policy choices with tech features have made "I want my laptop's auth token to only be usable on my laptop" a controversial opinion.

The problem being raised isn’t due to the size of the country though. It’s the size of the company (ie Apple and Google)

The answer to either question, really, is no. The powers that be have systematically implemented policies that keep us divided to prevent that eventual outcome.

I feel that we need a better political consensus on a free society that puts the monopoly of force in the hand of democratic legitimate forces. I currently feel that all digital violence lies in the hands of a few corporations. And at the same time there is politician that like this because they can through this proxy can indirectly execute control without any political legitimacy. Sorry, I do not believe in markets as guarantees for freedom. I have read too much dystopian sci-fi for that.

Any new country will have these same issues, eventually, and probably a lot more that don't seem obvious on the surface.

Fighting against these sorts of monopolies seems far more likely if we can figure out what forces inside the EU and the US are driving these changes and find a way to educated the public, interest groups, and politicians about what's going on.

What we really need is to meaningfully participate outside of the hierarchical monopolistic systems that demand our participation. That doesn't just mean that we create and hang out in distributed networks: it also means that we make and do interesting shit there, too.

The biggest hurdle I see is that we only really use uncensored spaces to do the shit that would otherwise be censored. We don't use distributed networks to plan a party with grandma, or bitch about the next series of layoffs. We don't use distributed networks to share scientific discovery or art.

I think part of the solution is to make software that is better at facilitating those kind of interactions, and the other part of the solution is actually fucking using it. How many of us are only waiting for the first part?

The status quo is nation-states in roughly their post-WW2 borders, and it's fiercely protected. The upside is stability and fewer wars, the downside is that the only way to try anything new is to co-opt an existing country. Adding to that, most countries are ethnostates that would prefer to have only a small percentage of their population be migrants. It's an easy way toward social cohesion, you just stay roughly where you're born, with people who were also born there and share the same cultural background. As we can see, it's not ideal - two lifelong neighbours can easily hold completely opposite moral values.

In other words, "we" exist only to fight against this one thing we disagree with. And even there, we probably don't all agree on how to fight it or what to do instead.

you can't if the service requires the network effect to function well, if at all. Look at blusky and all that alternatives, look at the pitiful attempts at making a youtube alternative, etc.

What evidence is there that it does?

Attestation purports to prove the code is running on an "approved" device. There are multiple reasons that has no real security value.

The first is that "approved" not only has no relationship to "secure", they're actually anti-correlated. As the article points out, GrapheneOS has better security than normal Android. Moreover, as a general rule the stock firmware that can pass attestation is more likely to be outdated and have security vulnerabilities than a custom ROM, and also as a general rule devices (like PCs) with more open hardware have the ability to be updated. A four year old attestation-passing Android phone may already be out of support and unable to be updated while still passing attestation; a 20+ year old PC can run the latest supported release of e.g. Debian.

The second is that "secure" and "runs code the service doesn't want" are likewise unrelated. Suppose there is an Android device which is still receiving updates. A local privilege escalation vulnerability comes out and that device will get the patch, but hasn't yet. So now any attacker with any of those devices can get root on it until they apply the patch. Which means they can get root after the main filesystem is unlocked, modify the filesystem so they continue to have root by changing something that isn't part of the attestation hash but still causes code or scripts to run as root later, and then update to the latest kernel and continue to have root on a device that passes attestation. The device is secure -- fully patched -- but it's the attacker's own device and they can run arbitrary privileged code on it. Requiring every device to be "secure" against the person who has ownership and permanent physical possession of it is a ridiculous thing to take as a security assumption.

And the third is that attestation doesn't actually do what you want it to anyway. Banks want to make sure the user isn't entering their credentials into a compromised phone, but having the official bank app refuse to run on that phone doesn't actually prevent that, because the fake bank app which is stealing the user's credentials on a compromised device won't require attestation to pass regardless of whether the real one does.

that's a corporate monopoly's wet dream.

When I tell people that this is even possible I get wide-eyed stares — as if they never contemplated that Meta could exercise their right to ban someone from the platform.

It's a huge problem and I have no idea how to fix it except talk about it and spread awareness. And I am not remotely interested in trying to work around the ban.

There is no Caesar to assassinate because it is everyone, or near enough. It is the idea that this is how you do things. Tyranny is in the air and in the water, that exploitation of power for more power by means of misery, old as mankind.

In such a world, removing one tyrant only gets you ruled by his rival, who is often worse. The historical recipe for freedom and abundance is a people who, as a whole people, are generous with power and expect it of each other at every level, and are viciously intolerant of its abuse. Such was the world of technology for about five decades in the last century, but it hasn't been so for the last two or three. I think it doesn't take much for a few awful people to eat up any abundance, if they are allowed to, and that war is written across the history of computing from its very beginning. But these days, it is not a healthy society defending itself from would-be conquerers, but a world of feuding warlords anxious to eat up any excess anywhere, not only for profit but because thriving and independent people are inherently a threat. With few exceptions, and it seems like fewer every year, any kingdom now which consists of a group of people and some code, be it a software service, a phone, a game, a car, or a dang toaster oven, looks like a despot extracting taxes from his peasants, not a king sheparding his people. Certainly the big ones are that way, and the legacy of the last generation continues to be eroded.

Whatever the means, that tangle of the legal and economic and social and educational and technological and cultural, and I do not pretend it is anything but a thorny and incomprehensible thicket, Aristotle's identification of the broad themes remains relevant. Divided, humiliated, disempowered - whatever the pretext, the encroachment of dark forces is unmistakable. The only defense is (and ever was) those who see their work as in some sense sacred and power as conveying a duty to serve. The generation for whom Superman is a central myth builds one way; the generation for whom it is Game of Thrones builds very differently. Not that these stories are necessarily causes, but their resonance is a reflection of how two very different groups of people think about power.

But even bigger problem is that institutions designed to prevent this from happening are not doing their job.

Thousands security service and civil servants take their wages and look the other way.

because it wasn't made

the decision which was made was having a digital ID wallet, that this needs hardware attestation (or something comparable) is somewhat of a direct consequence of existing laws/regulations regarding making IDs forgery safe

it also is a phone only application

the huge huge majority of phones runs Googled Android/iOS, so you support them

if there where a relevant 3rd party competition it would (most likely) supported it, too

going back to the "the president .. shut down .." argument: The US can shut down >90% of all smart phones used in the EU. I don't think the US being able to shut down something which in the end is fundamentally just a minor convenience feature is making much of a difference here.

But I also think that whole identity wallet (the regulations behind it) is approaching things from the wrong direction, carrying a credit card sized ID with you isn't really a problem or very inconvenient. So instead of having the whole attestation nonsense it would be more practical to simply not have attestation and in turn allow the digital ID only for usage where the damage it can cause is quite limited. Especially given that device attestation systems have a long history of being circumvented...

As a side note this whole app is distinct from the "use you ID with through your phone/NFC with applications" thing many EU countries have, through that solutions also tend to have attestation issues in most cases. But again most relevant use-case of it can be done just fine, without the security level attestation tries to provide, if approached pragmatically.

1. Explicitly designed as client states for the US

2. Explicitly designed as client states for the Soviet Union, with alliances switching over as the Soviet Union fell apart

3. Great Britain, a country whose electorate would probably only reconsider rejoining if the EU agreed to explicitly become British client states, because the only thing Britain hates more than France is those dastardly American upstarts[0].

The reason why this persists despite an openly hostile American president is the fact that the EU has no real alternative. The EU has a shitton of internal political distrust between member states, and the US was offering a lubricating alternative: "Just trust us." Politically distributed alternatives require balancing coalitions that are far more fragile.

[0] The history of European anti-Americanism is extremely fascinating, because it's effectively a Reactionary meme - as in, "wanting to restore the Ancien Regime" Reactionary, not "funny way to say Nazi Party member" Reactionary. And yet it's jumped across so many incompatible political ideologies that the average European probably had no clue why they hate America until Donald Trump gave them a good reason to.

I’ve written to politicians over the years about technical matters and it’s uniformly either a clearly form response or an inaccurate summation of the technical risks, if I’m been charitable because they don’t understand them either.

At a certain point it begins to feel pointless.

If enough people write, they may start finding it relevant.

It only makes sense they'll prioritize big-business interests over those of the common folk.

It's like handing a loaded gun to a kid, and saying "just don't take the safety off".

Of course kids are going to find ways around it. They are going to take the safety off.

Google certifies devices unpatched for the last 10 years, rooted, riddled with the malware, because the keys have leaked.

Google knows and still sells the lie.

But you should know better. Google is not selling the actual security, it's just protecting its business.

Being a highly skilled lawyer, UN official, can get you banned from all government EU services of the Drumpf doesn't like the fact you're investigating war crimes.

A part of that has already happened.

My intention with this is to make sure that if someone were to desolder the flash chip and reprogram it, they could completely own the device without the device or SoC manufacturer having a say in it or a way to prevent or detect it.

Also, governments are supposed to act in the interest of people.

Not that it changes much. It really should be illegal to enforce "secure boot" with no way for the device owner to opt out of it or enroll his own keys.

Modern cryptography allows for making DRM incredibly hard to break. And the disadvantage of "hardware attestation" DRM is that you have to break it not once, on a single device, the way you do to dump a "protected" movie, but on every single device that you want to use.

All modern PCs ship with Pluton coprocessors. The end-to-end remote attestation hardware infrastructure is all already there, waiting for someone to flip a switch and turn it on.

> hackers will find flaws instantly

Yeah.

https://tee.fail/

The ability to circumvent these cryptographic attestations and pretend to be a "pristine" corporate owned device while in fact being free will be a key strategic capability in the future.

They will no doubt pour billions into improving the technology though. I'm not sure if such a capability can be maintained over the long term. We don't have the resources.

No. It's the constant attempts to invade our computers and "prevent" the unwanted behavior that are problematic. See kernel level anticheat nonsense. They want to own our computers.

> if they want to play with others who don't want to play with cheaters then they have to use the official client

They should be able to play with whatever client they want. It's their computer, it should run whatever software they want.

Gaming and such are dedicated services. Fine if people agree to pay premium to have the required platform / console / etc.

General services such as communications / banking must be free, and must not require trusted hardware on the end point. The services must be designed to be secure even in the case of compromised end points. But that's against the current trend where all banks are trying to push all the responsibility on the end user because they want to reduce their costs. There are plenty of solutions but they don't go for it because it's not in their interest and they want to squeeze out any little penny of infrastructure cost.

How do old boomershooter communities tackle cheaters? When and why do methods that work on a social graph fail or necessitate anticheat? I agree on the hypervisor part. Putting different applications in microvms would be good for isolation.

What makes you think they will give us this magical hypervisor capability? It's more effort, increases the chances someone finds a bypass and takes power away from the incumbent online platforms. It's so much easier to just prevent it all. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is the amount of devices without this ability in circulation. But that number is shrinking rapidly.

It's the the Emperor's New Clothes in real life but for morals. No amount of Rossmanning is going to help society walk back its collective hypocrisy.

Sorry for how you may feel about it, but that *is* how it's being framed for the public..

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/eu-parliament...

Also, in the mean time, their announced "sovereign solutions for the European citizen" look ridiculous: now you'll be free from Visa and Mastercard for your payments but at the same time you'll need a phone approved by either Apple or Google.

If the only argument you can make every time someone proposes an onerous, privacy-destroying solution to this problem is deny the problem exists, you're going to lose.

GP is correct, we need an alternative we can point to.

Solving proof of humanity is very difficult without tying to some kind of difficult to replicate or automate ID.

... are not problems, no - but bots in general are

Neither of these situations are related to any so-called spyware. The fact that Google is involved here had to do with the fact that they are a trusted party for folks to rely on to ensure the desired properties are being met, nothing more. In theory it should be possible for other parties to provide similar attestation, but that party needs to be deeply involved in the OS and boot chain. Apple is obviously capable and is equally trusted. Graphene probably provides the necessary properties but lacks a good way to attest due to the reliance on Google specific attestation APIs. That could be remedied. Otherwise Graphene would need to create their own APIs and applications would need to use them, which would be a harder sell. In both cases the party asking for the attestation needs to decide to trust Graphene, which is still a barrier, but that's an easier way forward. Alternatively, Google could trust Graphene and everyone who already trusts Google would inherit such trust.

But if Google did support third-party attestation, would the GrapheneOS Foundation be happy? Most of the thread seems to be a call for attestation to die, which feels impractical and unachievable. But "Google could use it to permit GrapheneOS for Play Integrity if that was actually about security" seems to be the real ask, and that seems reasonable and achievable. If that's true, I think it would’ve been more effective to lead with that and focus on it.

> IANAL, but anti-competition lawyers/bodies should have a field day with this, but nobody seems to care

I'm gonna take a wild guess that proving the above statement in court (and then its necessary impact) might be a significant obstacle here?

I wonder if this would exclude rooted OSes, non-relocked bootloaders and things like that? Sorry for stupid question, still not quite understanding how this works.

That is why all companies should be small and no company should ever have a huge market share.

The cynic in me suspects it's a way of slowly but methodically eradicating online anonymity and thus anonymity in general.

I'd propose the primary factor is social - when a child is born there is a recorded attestation from the family and care providers about the minting of a new soul. When keys are compromised you similarly seek attestations from your social network (or social worker) that you need to furnish a new key.

The network could be attacked by literal force, blackmail, or deception, but it's very expensive compared the defense (strong legal punishment for attempts to subvert the network)

That last part is why I think the state has to do it, not technologists. There has to be a strong legal and cultural immune system in place to defend the network.

Isn't this basically worldcoin? Aside from the fact that worldcoin is run by people I wouldn't trust to watch my cats for an afternoon, the core principle with well thought out ZK crypto could work well.

End users should be authenticated so you can prove you're selling real eyeballs in the demographic mix you claimed to marketers and to provide lip service for the 'think of the children' regulators.

But anyone who's paying for ads should have as little friction as possible to dropping money and spewing garbage.

I'm surprised nobody is looking at some sort of "corporations are people" angle here-- we've attested the device ownership, but it's owned by the Lorem Ipsum Corporation, which is a legal/demographic dead end and spawned just long enough to buy the device.

First I'll say the government already has an ID system with a backdoor they mandate you use (your federal social security ID and state ID). The backdoor isn't very interesting because anyone with your ID in hand also has it.

So how about this:

1. State assigns citizens an ID at birth 2. State allows citizens to submit a public key along with their ID at any time 3. Citizens can go to their bank / private social network / whatever and say "this is my public key, you can use it to sign messages to me, and you can verify someone a) alive and b) a citizen of $state is reading it (from here you can bootstrap whatever protocol you want) 4. The state<>citizen network established in (2) is constantly under attack as stealing someones private key valuable so you also need a legal and technical framework to defend it

The protocol for submitting private keys and defending it from attack is a much longer post, I'm convinced there are ways to do it that drastically favor defense over offense, but that's not the point here.

Our question is can a government force it's way into the protocol you bootstrapped on top

How would they?

1. They could reset your public key to one they control the secret to, and then impersonate you digitally to break into your bank or social network. However I don't think they could do this secretly (the key update would necessarily be publically visible), so it's not really a back door. They can already do this with a search warrant. And if you're paranoid you can bootstrap your secondary cryptographic networks with multiple factors. So, this is on net more secure for you.

2. They could try to recover your secret key by force or warrant - but again not a back door.

I think the real concern isn't backdooring it's blacklisting, if this system becomes the L1 for every L2 crytographic interaction, they can practically remove your ability to freely transact. But that's a political problem you address with political means, I'm convinced from a technical perspective this is more secure and far cheaper for everyone.

If you have the $$$, which the big guys certainly do, they'll just buy the bare attestation bits and figure out how to use them directly.

I think you are conflating free speech with right to a platform and distribution. Which isn't quite a right, or at least not as constitutional, the former is about not obstructing speech, the latter is about positively enabling it.

One of the key aspects of distribution is cost. You can pay for a domain, which is 15$/yr, and a host (which can be as cheap), and distribute your software that way. Since when did we agree that randoms have right to publish software, and vanish? (And why are 'we' using such code in production with a straight face?) The internet founding fathers wisely designed Domain names, DNS, ICANN, HTTP, TCP, IP, NICs. NPM is not in that echelon, NPM is gratis, not freedom.

Also, freedom is, unless you are a libertarian a patriot or a nation, a historical concept, not irrelevant, but definitely a concept that was born out of a different time (slavery, secession), in its modern american sense, it's most definitely not gratis-adjacent.

To reference a specific American Freedom, in order to have access to justice, you have to pay court fees, and an attorney, there's mechanisms in place to waive those fees or have a public defender, but not even America's modern freedom developed a secondary system which pretended to have no cost, and if it did (private lateral arbitration).

I guess private entities have the right to offer public services by proxy, like with subdomains, github pages, vercel, npm packages. But I wouldn't call that freedom, in essence, the cake you can't have and eat in this case is Freedom and Gratis. You either pay the minimum costs established by the public system, or use a gratis non-free system to distribute your 'speech'.

And we the users, have the right to ignore the gratis spam and demand some sort of PoW for messages.

The system works

There should be multiple 2027 Motorola flagships meeting all the requirements for GrapheneOS. They'll be providing official support for it and they're already working on porting GrapheneOS to their devices.

Google started causing issues over 20 years ago.

You might need to the sentence again since I was quite clear who I was talking about:

"EU government"

"banking apps"

...and everyone else who benefits from pushing "digital payments, ID, age verification, etc." that will use "Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity" APIs.

It isn't that hard to understand.