As much as I hate bloatware, this is another example of unwarranted regulation. Encourage more competition in the mobile carrier space and the free market will solve this better than any government can.
The free market is there but we still have bloatware.
Does it need to be a regulation? Silly regulations is what made South Korea entirely dependent on Internet Explorer.
The anti-bloatware law is more than welcome, because competition keeps failing to reach the desired outcome. Regulations are exactly the right thing to do when competition and market fundamentally fails to reach what constitutes sanity, and converges to a local minimum.
Needless to say, such regulations should certainly be revisited when the root cause vanishes.
Has the market really failed in this regard? Can the Koreans not buy Android or iOS devices that are free from uninstallable bloatware? What about upcoming Ubuntu or Mozilla handsets, will they too be filled with uninstallable bloatware?
I understand that some people see this bloatware as a huge problem, but people should think very hard before calling out for regulations.
Come on...
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/the...
South Korea chose to mandate a technology rather than the desired outcome and never to update that law. They could alternatively have mandated multi-factor authentication or even simply made banks liable for any fraudulent transaction without any discussion of technology at all. These are all regulations but would affect the market in very different ways.
I have no problem with regulations in general. From the start here I said "silly regulations". Trying to combat bloatware by simply banning them is, in my opinion, silly. Even if you establish that this problem is so big that the government needs to get involved, there are other tools at their disposal. Tax incentives is one such tool.
I am also sure if you could give a customer the choice between a bloatware loaded phone and a clean phone (where he can install more games etc.) he would chose the one with no bloatware. He just has no idea there are ways to get rid of it. Some try over the known ways like the Apps preferences. But it's not working and they just don't know what to to about it.
This is where the government can help and if it does that why is this a problem?? You can still let people install apps afterwards that give them money or make whatever cheaper. But give them a choice!
Bloatware is not the only way companies make phones cheaper. A company like Google can sell Nexus at cheaper rate than say Samsung Galaxy because the whole Android OS is like a Google Adware. For every search that you make on Google Nexus every day Google is probably making $10-$100 per thousand search queries. Google probably can afford to give away Nexus for free. Samsung however has no other way to monetize the phone after they have already sold it.
"I am also sure if you could give a customer the choice between a bloatware loaded phone and a clean phone."
I am all for it. Give consumer the choice. Do not ask government to interfere with it. Market is already sensitive to this. Microsoft has come up with MS signature brands. Sooner or later phone companies will have to follow.
How come you are generalizing your criticism against all kind of government involvement? It's simply not true that all kind of involvement automatically creates more problems. Why don't you simply explain how it would create more problems in this case?
I was also not talking about Google vs. Samsung. I was talking about cheap "no name" phones available in some countries vs. brand products. Products which are selling on a price where only the production costs + simple profit margin matter (old school market if you wish). Not the show that Apple or Samsung are playing where the high price makes the product artificially more "valuable". This behavior is breaking your simple illusion of a market where we all profit and the competition and other simple market mechanisms are balancing the market in a healthy way. (I doubt that this illusion has ever been true...)
As I've said: the customer has no choice here. He can't get rid of the stuff. There is no choice. Today you pay sick amounts of money for a shiny phone that still has all that bloatware. Thats why we need an external force to give the power back to the customers. And the only force able to do that is the government.
Market is not sensitive at all. If it would be, we wouldn't need a regulation. MS will play the same game as soon as they become a relevant player on the market because the method above works and they just want to make more money.