Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.
Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.
Right, but when we’re talking in the context of regulating broad democratic systems, the potential for deliberate corruption of the systems is vastly greater while employing black cube technology.
And I’m saying we can mitigate the risk by driving a wedge between hardware and software. Require companies to allow competition on their hardware. I think Apple and Android manufacturers should be required to allow custom ROMs on their phones and tablets, and provide sufficient documentation to facilitate that. A big part of that is Right to Repair as well, but the focus should be on documentation so customers can find/develop workarounds, not on forcing standardization (i.e. the fight to standardize on USB-C is nice, but it’s less important than forcing Apple to provide tooling to re-pair serialized components).
If customers can control the hardware, that represents a check against the hardware manufacturer. The next fight is “the cloud,” and again, if customers can control their hardware, there will be alternatives to those cloud services.
So I think the fight needs to be to enable and develop FOSS alternatives for all consumer hardware because that at least provides an alternative of those companies decide to act against the interests of their customers.