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Comment by skywal_l | Hacker News Reader

Can a TOS waive any rights? Surely there are some unalienable rights.

I, personally, don't feel that "making money by doing business in a particular market" should be a right it is illegal to waive.

If it were inalienable, things like regional distribution agreements would be void, since you could sign away your ability to sell in a certain country and then compete with your distributor anyway.

Let's keep some perspective here - there is no "inalienable right to sell apps to smartphone users via a private commercial storefront".

> Let's keep some perspective here - there is no "inalienable right to sell apps to smartphone users via a private commercial storefront".

This is unacceptable in a world where governments and businesses are increasingly gating services behind those same marketplaces.

Something’s got to give here. We can’t allow people to create a captive, gatekept marketplace and then create/allow significant pressure that herds people into that same marketplace.

IMO, break up all the gatekeepers using antitrust and require that critical infrastructure and businesses (government, banking, utilities, payments, etc) allow alternate access paths that don’t require a smartphone.

Imagine the landlord of a library were to close the store just because someone complained that the library was selling stolen books. Would you consider this acceptable? And we are talking about a landlord that basically own the city here.

I don't know in this particular case of Luanti, but this could be people's livelihood we are talking about, there should be some sort of legal due process.

It really feels like middle-ages kind of justice.

at the same time google is moving to forbid other app stores so...

All rights should be inalienable, simply because if they are not then all corporations will put "you waive all your rights" into their standard legal boilerplate.

The consequences do not matter. Voiding regional distribution agreements is a small price to pay for actually having rights.

If all rights were inalienable, an employment contract would not mean I need to pay my employee, because I would have an inalienable right to keep my own property (cash).

Also nobody would offer the contract in the first place because the employee would keep their inalienable right to choose how they spend their own time (not working).

EVERY contract is about giving something up in exchange for getting something. In most legal systems a contract is void if either party gives nothing. So in a world where nothing can be signed away, no contracts exist at all.

I think this take holds up very poorly when the reality boils down to:

"Government policy and critical services have made it so there are functionally two markets for mobile software, each owned by the manufacturers and developers of the mobile OS and hardware"

This isn't like physical sales, where I can open up a store anywhere. This also isn't like classic software sales for windows/mac desktops, where I can sell you a program from any website or physical store.

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Functionally - this is like these private companies revoking your business license at their whim. I don't find it a tenable position.

> If it were inalienable, things like regional distribution agreements would be void, since you could sign away your ability to sell in a certain country and then compete with your distributor anyway.

Good. These are responsible for a lot of awfulness around media distribution and actively harm competition resulting in a wore result for consumers.

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