I really want two things:

* companies cannot engage in any activity a common person would consider “spying”, cannot take the data collected by users of that service and transfer it to another entity, and third parties may not aggregate data collected about persons for any reason. There are a million and one useful reasons to do each of these things, but companies have proven themselves morally bankrupt and should lose that ability. This would go beyond “opt-in”, just make it illegal or the impractical (e.g. it would require a notary, licensed broker, or lawyers on both sides to engage in the practice)

* digital “purchases” are transferrable and have all of the rights and privileges afforded to physical goods. The producer/consumer balance shifted completely in favor of the producer with digital goods. Terms need to be more favorable to the purchaser as well as protections following the dissolution of a digital marketplace.

I concur. We need to establish a "secondary markets act", which would allow individuals to transact accounts and digital items worth under a certain amount (let's say $10k, as a non-waivable right, so it wouldn't apply to larger B2B contracts). Essentially, these things should be viewed as property of the consumer and be freely sold. Without the freedom to transact, there can't be a free market.

If I have full ownership of a digital good, then I have the ability to copy it.

Any limitation of my ability to copy requiring removing some control from the owner and escrowing it with another party (e.g. DRM).

As much as I hate to say it, allowing digital good resale is a good use for a blockchain: uniquely identifying an instance and then keeping a decentralized ledger of who owns it at any time.

However, there would still need to be a carrot to make this system attractive.

If there isn't, then why wouldn't people just create infinite copies off-ledger and ignore it?

And without any viable digital goods ownership system, who wouldn't companies default to the current model of only offering licenses / subscriptions?

I assume plenty of people are willing to pay for things they appreciate. Maybe the carrot can be some kind of recognition: you get to make a digital signature from that token that you can display as a part of your digital identity. There could be discussion forums that require you to have such a token to participate in.

resaleable digital licenses. that's why Steam banned them, not because Valve is noble but because if your video game license was an NFT you could resell it outside of their marketplace and they like their little monopoly

This is of course also a factor in the move to subscriptions since you'd no longer own a persistent license or product and as such there's nothing to sell. Ironically this should also mean the 'product' (subscription) has far less value than the actual product, even if it's technically the same system/software. Yet subscriptions are more costly than a one-off you repeat every couple of years. Sigh.

There is a very easy way to get around such a requirement from legislation: Just call it licensing instead of a purchase.

The need for such a legislation is corporations reckless use of the words "purchase" and "buy" for goods that have been licensed.

Licensing should come with enhanced consumer rights e.g. an explicit license duration and allow the consumer to return the license for pro-rata refund within that duration. The license should be for the IP and honoured for all formats and platforms that meet some regularity threshold. The absurdity of having to rebuy things you "own" because you switch device or format has to end.

Along similar lines, hardware should be called "hire" not "sell" when the manufacturer maintains control over the device e.g. locked bootloaders, encryption keys, online service dependencies, forced updates with no downgrade, remote-access privileges, telemetry, not meeting "right-to-repair", hardware locking preventing component replacement or choice of consumable (e.g. ink) etc.

Similar return rights should apply if hardware is leased. Seller would need to be insured/escrow to meet consumer refunds if they break their side of the lease (e.g. going bust and shutting down required online services).

The law should formalize the concepts of rentals (licenses) and purchases. Purchases create non-waivable rights of transferability and allows the owner to demand compensation when a service closes: for example if I shut down my movie platform, you should get to download a copy of everything you own.

Licenses on the other hand do not confer such rights, but should still be transferable under a certain value and have a set period during which its terms must be fulfilled, otherwise the licensee needs to be compensated. No "we change the terms at our sole discretion at any moment" nonsense.

Vendors can give you extra rights (like prorated returns or exchanges), but they can't take any of the codified rights away. I assume there needs to be some details about companies just setting a license of one day but never revokes access to avoid the regulation, but someone smarter than me can probably figure that out.

For larger licenses I think the customer (usually customers) has a greater negotiating leverage, so it isn't as necessary to codify these terms, but of course this is contingent on there not existing trillion-dollar corporations, which is not the world we live in.

Buying may have been a misnomer but it had some useful baggage that is shed with the terminology shift.

I didn't realize there were many people defending credit scores. I mean yeah, I would just assume they should be illegal. At least in their current opaque form where it's impossible to contest or even get someone to explain your score to you.

Credit scoring significantly outperforms any other methodology for assessing default risk, including credit matricies and especially human assessments (humans are shockingly bad at assessing default risk, rarely much better than a biased coin flip).

It's all well and good to say we should get rid of credit scores, but because they are so much more effective at assessing default risk than other methods, the consequence will be significantly higher rates of default, which means more people in financial hardship, and higher interest rates generally (though especially to low risk borrowers who will now be assessed as having closer-to-average default risk)

It's also not often appreciated, but credit scoring is also the single best technique we have to stop people borrowing beyond their means and entering into financial hardship and debt spirals. There are other techniques that exist to identify at-risk borrowers but these alone aren't as good as an approach which also incorporates credit scores.

As for explainability, unfortunately the best credit models are trained using AI techniques, which results in low explainability (since the risk signals are complex and multivariate). Older GLM approaches can be used, but aren't as good, so if we want high explainability, the trade off is worse performing credit models, and thus higher borrowing costs.

I think it's reasonable for people to want a society where past financial difficulties (self-induced or otherwise) do not make it difficult for a person to get a job or rent an apartment. That's probably a reasonable preference to impose through legislation even if a credit score has predictive value for the legitimate interests of employers or landlords.

A credit bureau's real product is the credit file, which contains your history of inquiries, defaults, collections, court judgements etc. In some countries it also includes granular payment history information.

From this file, many lenders compute their own internal credit scores. They do this because the credit scores published by the bureaus are the likelihood to default on any loan, however in practice consumers are often more likely to default on certain types of debt than others. Also, many lenders have additional data points that can be considered which the bureau's don't capture, such as the structure of the loan.

If there's anything questionable going on (e.g. using variables which act as proxies for factors prohibited by ECOA or FHA) it will be occuring in these proprietary lender-specific models, however the parameters used in these models also embed commercial sensitive information about the behaviour of their customer base, so I doubt many lenders will be keen to release them.

I live in a Central European country.

The other advantage over credit scores is that people willingly give their information out and are able to understand the banks decision.

That's really what's driving support for credit scores, isn't it? That they provide some some people the (perception of an) ability to prove their character, their moral superiority, and to feel rewarded for all their hard sacrifices.

Similar, I believe, to credit cards and all those rewards and air miles shenanigans - everyone feels they're gonna be winners, so they support a private tax on everyone.

For example, credit card points are a zero sum game. Credit scores are not. Everyone could be creditworthy, but many are not, and it’s highly beneficial to the entire system to be able to identify which group a person fits into (including for the person who isn’t creditworthy!)

My mind isn't made on credit scores, though I do feel it might be a case similar to insurance - it's not strictly a zero-sum game, but it's also socially harmful to have such a system be 100% efficient. I.e. with insurance, if everyone was correctly pooled into small bucket that near-perfectly reflects their actual risk profile, insurance would stop making sense - those who need it most wouldn't be able to afford it, and those who could afford it need it the least and would be better off putting that money into savings accounts.

There's a lot of areas in the economy where increasing efficiency past some point just makes systems inhumane and exacerbates social problems.

I feel default risk estimation may just be like that - the more reliable you want your credit score, the more invasive you need to be wrt. what information you collect and how you do it; meanwhile, the system becomes less and less tolerant of mistakes and unfortunate circumstances, while also exerting more control over how people live their lives.

Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about credit, and getting credit cards and loans to improve/game their credit scores with their future mortgage in mind. That very much affects people's life choices at scale. I don't think having everyone leading their lives to optimize their credit score is a way to have a healthy society; conversely, maybe letting the lenders eat a little more risk, and the wealthiest (and most responsible with money, and most morally superior) have a little smaller line, actually improves overall well-being.

> Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about credit, and getting credit cards and loans to improve/game their credit scores with their future mortgage in mind

I've encountered very, very few people doing this to an inappropriate degree (obviously yes you should consistently demonstrate creditworthiness, that's not gaming though). Anecdotally, the people I see doing this are actually seriously not creditworthy. A whole lot of "you bought 3 cars and fucked your score, here's how to dig your way out." But like... the evidence actually shows you can't be trusted with credit!

I don't disagree with any of your big picture concerns about the system and the possible edge cases or distortions of priorities. I just haven't seen evidence those are huge problems relative to the value of the system.

Average interest rate on mortgages in Spain with this system appears to be _half_ that of the US, so it seems this isn't so ineffective that premiums have to spike to match. (is that right? https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-rates/ suggests 6% interest mortgages is a current average in the USA while Spain is below 3% now - personal anecdotes plus gov stats shows 3.25% average on all issued mortgages in 2024: https://ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadistica_...)

Spain also enforces a much stricter debt to income ratio, which means it’s much harder to get loans for people that already have debt, which means the risk profile is reduced for those that do get approved.

Also Spain’s unemployment is among the highest in the EU — and almost three times higher than the U.S., so the central bank’s lower interest rates reflect less of a concern over inflation and more of a concern towards encouraging growth. The low interest rates in Spain aren’t a reflection of reduced risk but of lower central bank rates. You could get 30 year mortgages in the U.S. just a few years ago approaching 2%.

Comparing mortgage rates across countries is a pointless endeavor because the macroeconomic circumstances are vastly different. For example, one would think that lower interest rates would result in a increase of housing supply in Spain as investors build more housing because the loans would be cheaper — however that isn’t the case because of the post-tax return on investment (and regulatory risk) for real estate is far worse than an equivalent investment in the United States despite higher lending costs. A €10 million housing project in Spain has a lower ROI than the same project would in North Carolina. Interest rates could be zero in Spain and it wouldn’t change the housing market much because of the myriad of other factors that go into the spreadsheet.

Also almost all the things GP listed apply all across Europe. So the "Spain character assassination" exercise is pointless.

Any EU country - regulations tend to be strict and vary from country to country. There is usually a central registry with either history of violated agreements and/or currently active loans. In pre-approval for a loan the borrower typically self-declares their credit capacity and the lender checks the registry for red flags. Before concluding the approval the lender will require supporting documentation (typically salary certificate, bank statement and/or tax returns).

In Spain they look at your last few months of bank movements and calculate how much to loan you (usually something like max a third of your income can go to mortgage payments)

There is some risk to the bank because the house may have declined in value and it may be tricky to sell it when you default. That's why they do a risk assessment, but it can be a lot less invasive than for providing a personal loan for an education.

Which is another thing we don't do over here in the EU.

Perhaps what's left doesn't necessitate a full-blown credit score system?

So instead a local credit union got a free $1500 for servicing that loan. A loan that I explicitly only took to "build credit" ie, pay a bank profit so they would vouch for me, which is what a credit score is designed to show, how much profit you give to banks and credit card companies for financing.

They don't want to loan out money that might be less profitable than a loan to someone who has paid a thousand credit card payments.

The credit union then proceeded to Not report my loan to the credit agencies! meaning I still have no credit. Awesome.

We do have a centralized registry of "bad debtors" and that has a highly negative effect on your ability to get a loan.

There are still credit bureaus, and things like defaults, judgements, etc are recorded, and when you apply for credit this is checked.

However there are crucial differences to a score system like the UK and (I assume) the US - there is no 'building good credit', you don't get any benefit from having existing credit products and using them well. In fact the opposite - having other forms of credit like a credit card available is seen as a negative when you apply for a mortgage and will impact the amount you can get loaned. They'll literally knock the credit card limit off the top of the mortgage offer.

They significantly improve the ability of a lender to model the default risk associated with a borrower, which results in lower borrowing costs for higher quality customers, as well as stopping debt spirals for people struggling.

In the absence of credit scores, higher quality borrowers will be charged higher interest rates or require higher collateral, since they are less differentiated from average quality borrowers, and/or access to credit will be restricted to a narrower proportion of the population.

I am used to the word "bias" meaning a specific kind of inaccuracy.

Shouldn’t those costs be higher because of the increased risks they represent? If someone has a habit of not paying their debts, why would a lender take on the higher risk without getting paid more? They wouldn’t, so they simply won’t loan the money.

However on the other side of this, nobody has to borrow money. If you don’t borrow, credit scores are irrelevant.

Given we're talking about alternatives here, I think this should be: "In the absence of credit scores, or some other mechanism for comparing potential borrowers". There's lots of ways to compare borrowers, and if you assume credit scores are the only way to do it, all your solutions are going to involve them.

Loans involve the calculation of parameters. You can either choose those implicitly through personal knowledge, or explicitly through a scalar metric (credit score). There is no viable third option, and the first option is just a bad version of the second, in the end.

It's worth pointing out that credit scores actually are actually just the P(^default) expressed on an integer rather than fractional scale.

There's also multiple credit scores, there are the scores computed by credit bureaus which look at your P(default) against all lenders, but many lenders also compute their own internal credit scores using models trained against their own customer base (and possibly also taking into account additional data that they hold about you).

But anyway, I wonder what the housing market would do if mortgages weren’t possible to get. I bet the prices would go down.

"Following the Panic of 1837, the first commercial credit reporting organizations formed."

It only took a financial crisis and 3-year-long depression for people to realize that credit is important.

Here in Sweden we don’t have it. When you apply for a new loan the bank can request information of other debts you have. And you have to send info about your income and answer questions about your expenses (living costs, number of children living at home, etc).

In a lot of countries, the only external thing the bank is allowed to use when you apply for a loan is whether or not you have existing loans (which is just to prevent you from borrowing money to pay off other borrowed money), the amount of money you make annually and what you currently have saved up.

That's because it's difficult to imagine how alternative app stores would force first party app stores to be better, or risk losing business. For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you. They would also have a real incentive to provide new features and innovations. You don't have to switch to a third party app store to realize the benefits that follow from allowing them to exist.

That, I doubt. Most stuff already is dirt-cheap on the App Store (and riddled with ads). It’s not like, for example, getting into Apple’s App Store is so expensive that it adds dollars to the price of apps.

Are we using the same App Store? Anything of worth is behind a $10 monthly subscription. Apple has intentionally made subscriptions the only viable commercial model on the App Store. Then they take 30% (with some exceptions). They forbid competition, so developers aren't free to distribute to iOS customers in any other way.

How do you think Apple has done that? They’ve always had the option for a one-time payment for apps, and those can be fairly high ($999,99 until December 2022 and $10,000 after that time, according to https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23496734/apple-app-store-...)

Even if Apple did that, I don’t see any evidence that was intentional.

I think it’s more that the market has spoken, and said that “you can’t sell $100 apps on the App Store”. And even then, there are counterexamples.

The only thing Apple may hav head to do with that is that it ‘gave’ zillions of developers visibility for their $0,99 apps on the App Store. That may have led users to think software should be cheap.

It's riddled with adverts because it's the only way to get revenue out of such a terrible system.

"I love valve"

... but they have exactly the same business model, and people genuinely promote valve as if they want it to be a monopoly. (though I am aware that it's not one now- first-party launchers are universally reviled by gamers).

I'm not sure how.

Valve allow you to install whatever game store you want on the Steam Deck. They win custom by making a better experience than everyone else, Apple win because they have formed an environment where you have no other option.

If Apple wanted the same business model, they would allow alternative storefronts, they wouldn't block updates if they decided they didn't like you anymore, and they wouldn't block you from even replacing the OS on the device you bought if you wanted to.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure apart from running stores that they are the same thing at all.

Subs, kinda agree.

Also it's only 30% for the top of the market (15% for a lot of apps), and only for digital goods (so not my banking apps or Amazon), and it has to be stuff bought in app (so not two of my last three employers).

And even 30% was good when it was new. Only looks bad now because the market grew so much — but the market did grow, and I was expecting monopoly action around when they first passed one trillion dollar valuation.

With Epic especially, that felt like one arrogant giant swiping at another giant. Especially due to concerns that Fortnite was designed to be addictive, that loot boxes are gambling.

Or would they stay 99 and thus no change for the consumer?

The DMA is about developer choice, not consumers

Ultimately it is about both. The idea behind that is pretty much the idea of capitalism: competition drives innovation.

While I personally do not care about the alternative stores, I care very much about stuff like the in app purchases. I am not using Apples subscriptions and all the rules and steps to circumvent the rules make it horribly inconvenient to deal with subscriptions.

I also hate the fact that I cannot buy an ebook in app because of Apple‘s 30% cut

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...

I think many, especially smaller, developers don’t realize the value they get for that commission: distribution, payment processing, billing, tax processing/collection, dispute handling, marketing (i.e. a storefront,) management of versions/updates for users, not to mention security benefits (for users.)

If people don’t like that, nothing is stopping them from choosing not to sell to Apple device owners. If Apple device owners don’t like it, they can switch to a competitor.

The whole point of this regulation is to enable both sides to make that choice without having to give up on the iPhone and the rest of their app purchases etc. in that ecosystem.

And for that Apples IAP fee of 30% is about ten times higher than elsewhere.

So now we're competing with the "local grocery store", even on the "information superhighway"?

EU users might be best suited to respond, as they are currently experiencing this change (though I believe the impact will be different once it's rolled out globally).

1. How do you think having multiple app stores will affect user experience and app discoverability? It seems likely that not all apps will be available in every store, meaning users may have to search across multiple platforms to find what they need.

We’ve seen similar issues in the gaming industry, where each company has its own launcher, or in the movie industry, where content is locked behind different providers, making it difficult to figure out where to access it. This is why platforms like Netflix and Steam initially succeeded.

Meanwhile, the Windows/PC model has shown that an open ecosystem can be a security and privacy nightmare for the average user.

2. On that note, how do you envision ensuring privacy and security in these alternative app stores? Risks could range from major tech companies like Google or Facebook running their own stores and collecting even more user data, to scammers creating fake stores that steal credit card information.

The important thing to realise is that no one wanted alternative stores. Not really. What everyone wanted was for the existing store to not be stressful oppressive garbage. If Apple didn’t have draconian rules where they charge too high margins and repeatedly reject apps for stupid petty reasons, they wouldn’t have found themselves in this situation. The other big players would even likely accept having to sell via in-app purchases (offering better consistent protection to consumers) if Apple weren’t egregiously eating into their margins.

Don’t take my word for it, we have (now public) internal emails where Apple executives discuss these very issues and question how long they could keep it up.

Alternative stores were the next best thing. When it became clear that Apple wouldn’t fix their behaviour, the only choice was to fight for legislation where they don’t have as much of a say. Make no mistake, they (Tim Cook in particular) brought it on themselves.

As to your specific questions:

1. App discoverability has been unusable for years. The App Store is the last place where I look for apps.

2. The App Store is already filled with privacy-violating apps and scams. Apple ensures jack shit. Scammers don’t need to create fake stores, they are already doing pretty well for themselves in the main store selling flashlight apps with expensive weekly subscriptions.

Is this situation worse for non-technical users? Maybe. Right now there are big scary warning when trying to add third-party stores, and that does make some sense. But Apple will have to get off their ass and make better privacy protections at the OS level.

People say this, but of all the apps I have on my phone, I'm not sure I actually paid for any. Browser, smart-device controllers, a few games, streaming services (that I pay for direct), messengers of various sorts, banking, transport, ticketing, government apps.

I know people must pay for apps as Apple make a lot of money off it, but it's not really something I do.

most app/games etc is freemium and I can tell you that smaller people that pay is subsidies the system because most if not all people using it freely

Straw man.

> they'd be doing it on whatever app store is available,

But they can't do that, that's the issue.

A large portion of the data that is illegally shared should never have been collected in the first place.

What I would like to see regulated are all those dark-pattern surveillance techniques that are slapped on absolutely everything these days. I’m just looking at a toaster, I don’t want the toaster company looking back at me just because I looked at a fucking toaster once. Makes me weary of looking at stuff. This wasn’t even that freaky pre-AI, but now it’s a whole other ballgame. Stasi would love this stuff.

That's the reason why even with its warts, I have been a very happy Android user. It's my device, and I can modify it to become whatever I want it to be (with some constrains that don't really affect me atm).

Is it my device or not, Apple?

I've seen this sentiment a couple of times here and I think it's the wrong framing on what the EU is trying to do. Third party app stores aren't the point; they're just a vehicle enabling users to choose which software they want to use without interference from Apple. The indie devs using AltStore PAL don't all necessarily want to use it, but they're forced to because of the way Apple chose to implement DMA compliance.

In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they want (this is to the best of my understanding of the text, but IANAL).

When you say you don't care about alternative app stores, what you're really saying is that you don't care about the end user's ability to use apps that aren't approved by Apple. That is certainly an opinion that many folks have, but I'd prefer that they refrain from hiding behind the shield of "third party app stores are weird and who even cares", whether deliberately or not.

Is Apple actually complying with the DMA then? They are still requiring notarization, which means apps still have to be approved by them.

End users can (and do!) use apps not approved by Apple on mobile devices every day. They just do it on something that’s not an iPhone (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and know what they’re getting themselves into). Corps and devs can also run custom software without Apple approval. I’m personally fine with that delineation and I’d much rather have stronger GDPR-like and property laws.

> (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and know what they’re getting themselves into)

It is a common misconception that people can "just" jailbreak their iPhone if they're not happy with the walled garden. This requires someone finding a critical-impact zero day vulnerability in iOS, quite literally worth around half a million dollars [1]. Apple is hard at work as we speak trying their hardest to prevent those from slipping in -- and that is a good thing, in general. It's not currently possible to jailbreak any up-to-date iOS device.

I'm all for sandboxing and other iOS security features; I'm not proposing that we get rid of any of that. Sideloaded apps would presumably still be fully sandboxed, and would still only be able to access sensitive data with explicit user consent. This is very different than the situation on Windows, where in 2025 you can still double click an .exe and instantly have all of your passwords and credit cards stolen (not an exaggeration; this literally happens).

I'm also not against the idea of making it difficult enough to enable sideloading so as to make social engineering attacks against grandma effectively impossible. This is what Chromebooks are doing; nerds get root, but grandma doesn't.

However, the DMA is more concerned with delivering alternative apps to everyone than it is concerned with empowering techies. So I can see why you might not support it even if you want to have a little more control over your phone, as a techie.

[1] https://archive.is/9jdW7

Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?

I shouldnt need a gmail/icloud account to setup an android/ios device. Open those api's and let me use another hosted service or host my own.

After a device becomes unsupported release the unlock codes or whatever. At that point it becomes a security hazard anyway. I should be able to create custom roms/software to keep using it if I want.

This book explains everything:

https://store.hbr.org/product/information-rules-a-strategic-...

I’ve never seen it in a library, but you can occasionally find used copies, if you don’t want to buy a brand-new book that is a roadmap to doing things you disagree with.

For those not in the know, Carl Shapiro [1] and Hal Varian [2] are well known economics researchers. Hal Varian ended up working at Google building the AdWords auction after writing this it seems.

For anyone wondering, there's this person called *Anna* that has an *archive* where the book can be found.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Shapiro

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Varian

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

Amazon and Apple are undercutting Hollywood and losing money. They're subsidizing their Hollywood efforts with funds from unrelated business units (hardware, grocery stores, primary care doctors, etc.) You can get cheap (free) entertainment if you subscribe to Amazon Prime shipping, so why spend money on the competitor's product if entertainment is (at some gross sense and scale) fungible?

The thing that needs to be broken up is the ability of these giants to subsidize moves into healthy existing markets or even nascent markets. They push out the incumbents with their massive cash hoards gained from unrelated business unit activity. They don't even try to profit at first until they've captured the market and suffocated the existing players.

It's unfair that Amazon and Apple can make movies, buy out James Bond, Lord of the Rings, etc. off of their trillion dollar market caps, iPhones, and AWS profits. It's unfair that they can plaster free advertising on the side of their delivery vans or get free ad placement front and center in their App Store. That costs everyone else millions of dollars - a large percentage of the unit economics. Big tech has every advantage and is literally murdering entire markets with these insane, unfair advantages.

These giant companies are like an invasive species. They're like lionfish moving into the Caribbean, killing all the local fauna. No natural predators. Complete decimation of the local ecology.

Their behavior disconnects innovation, healthy and rational market monetization, and the actual rewards that should go to the investment and labor capital pioneering those areas. Institutional giants are snuffing out anything they see that they can expand into.

Big companies need to be broken up for the sake of healthy markets and innovation. Big companies are gravitational singularities that distort everything.

I feel like this line of argument is gaining broader traction. When I was making these points four and five years ago I was frequently downvoted. I feel powerless to affect change, but I'm starting to notice that many powerful players seem to be echoing this sentiment. Tim Sweeney, Marc Andreessen, and now YCombinator.

YCombinator hasn't had many centicorns lately, and the reason for that is that big tech is sucking out all of the oxygen in the room. You have to pay their tolls to play - discovery and distribution incredibly frictionful, and you're always in some manner paying the gatekeepers. They're bloodletting margin from the innovators and practitioners that need it the most.

VC firms are certainly thinking this over. Google, Apple, and the rest put a ceiling over what portcos can ultimately grow up into, and they can even force M&A when in a different world that would be a subpar outcome. These firms and mid-cap tech companies can be a powerful voice to help shape regulation.

I shouldn't even have to mention how this hurts the small business, lifestyle business, and mom and pop operations. Tech giants are finding every way to squeeze the lemon that they possibly can. If we can get enough of them talking about their pain points, that can be another set of voices to add to the angry cacophony.

Europe has gotten louder in beating this drum, and I'm hoping the wave is starting to come to shore domestically. It'll make the world better for all players - even the tech giants.

Google, as a sum of its parts, is frankly undervalued. They aren't properly monetizing all of their properties. If they were forced to break up and make each business unit anti-fragile, actually competitive, actually profitable, and wholly standalone, most of those business units would emerge stronger and better for customers. Shareholders would see benefit.

But the broader impact to the health of the overall market is what's most important, and that could be tectonically massive. Everything and everyone who isn't "big tech" - every industry, every individual - has been ensnared in this Pacific garbage patch of netting. The once-free Internet has so many artificial barriers that you have to pay to bypass, platforms are walled gardens that don't play together, and the companies that own the gates aren't good stewards. Their role is just to accrue power and tax.

Freeing the markets up again will make everyone collectively so much more innovative and profitable.

I hope we see change soon.

As an engineer I dread having to do all the toil required to disentangle them, should that be the DOJ and USSC mandate.

You’re welcome, I too find my disposition infected from time to time.

> VC firms are certainly thinking this over. Google, Apple, and the rest put a ceiling over what portcos can ultimately grow up into, and they can even force M&A when in a different world that would be a subpar outcome. These firms and mid-cap tech companies can be a powerful voice to help shape regulation.

I’m skeptical that this will happen in an environment of deregulation. However, it is possible that we’ll see change on a longer timeline.

> Google, as a sum of its parts, is frankly undervalued. They aren't properly monetizing all of their properties.

I couldn’t agree more. Every time I see Google kill a product line, it bothers me that it wasn’t spun off into its own company.

> Freeing the markets up again will make everyone collectively so much more innovative and profitable.

I’m not sure if I subscribe to the belief that markets were ever free. I do agree that we should do as much as we can to open them up though.

> I hope we see change soon.

Indeed, I simply hope we can see a return to reasoned discourse.

Thank you again echelon. May the winds ever be to your back, the sun to your face, and free markets on your horizon.

Preventing the predictions of Marxists like Lenin around "Late Stage Capitalism" (disregarding the imperialist/colonialism overtones) from becoming a reality was supposed to be the job of trustbusting organizations like the FTC and DOJ but well... here we are.

ISBN 087584863X or 9780875848631, "Information Rules" by Carl Shapiro. Available on the prominent alternative procurement network.

Seems like a progressive corporation tax would be an easy way to allow "the market" to naturally limit the size of corporations and find the correct separation points for separate businesses.

Nicer to stay at eg. 25% and have competition. Maybe ramp it exponentially

(yes, I know there are loopholes in this pie-in-the-sky)

Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new market, that would imply you are immediately taxed at 100%.

That's innovation, which is not the issue here. Creating new markets is usually win-win (initially), even with big tech leading the way.

The more damaging issue is in taking over existing markets in ways that do not benefit that market. e.g Big tech Moving into film and TV, it's not simply a buyout with massive capital, it's about burning money in one ancillary market to benefit their primary market, but usually at a detriment to the ancillary one. They are unfairly leveraging their primary market position, tying products together, even if they don't ever make any profit in the movies, they create more and more lock-in with their platforms, making it harder and harder to not use them. The overall affect, more profit, without a chance of competition.

Should Microsoft have stayed with just BASIC compiler? Should it be illegal for it to enter operating systems market? What about productivity suite?

You're preaching to the choir here. The post I was replying to described a policy that would have made that an issue, without some way of addressing that case.

In antitrust law, a "market" is defined as an area of effective competition that includes both product (or service) and geographic dimensions. The US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission use market definitions to evaluate competition under laws like the Clayton Act.

Tools like the hypothetical monopolist test are used to determine whether a market is too narrow by assessing if a monopolist could profitably raise prices.

> Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new market, that would imply you are immediately taxed at 100%.

Fine, pick some fractional coefficient.

(That said, there are a hundred other things that'd need fixing for such a hypothetical to be viable, let alone desirable. This was just the thing that stood out the most to me, particularly on a site centered around startups.)

As an engineer, I can tell you it's not even easy to keep things working internally - let alone support every possible integration. Just because it's easy to say, doesn't mean it's feasible to do.

But if you're convinced its what people want, there's nothing preventing you from making it your life - like other people have done with their strategies.

What people are asking for is not actively preventing other integrations. That means through business means and deals as well as technological measures.

No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.

No one wants to deal with the Windows 98ificaiton of phones.

> No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.

Just like no one wants to get rid of Internet Explorer, right?

No one wants to, in large part because it's a fucking nightmare. I say that as someone who not only knows how, but knows how to write the code for it too. Why is it so hard? What makes it a nightmare? Their business model requires a walled garden, because otherwise...

Anyways, People have no issues migrating from myspace to facebook, or from youtube to instagram to tiktok. If it wasn't a fucking nightmare full of bullshit, user hostile rules (e.g. manifest version, or max age of TCP connections) there'd be a market for Google alternatives.

Right now the only motivation is privacy, and Graphiene works pretty well. Turns out, caring about privacy is a lot more motivating than wanting some feahure to work. Especially when "they" have a vested interest in making sure no one else can provide that feature.

They just know that complaining about it gets them nowhere, so you don't hear it much outside minor explosions of rage as they lose everything.

In fairness I also want a goose that lays golden eggs.

(And yes, we can quibble about alternate Android app stores in countries that aren't China, but Google's rigged that game heavily in their favor via defaults)

I have a Galaxy S7 that is in this condition, and I haven't the time to try to reinstall it.

Many users never face this problem because they buy new phones before their old ones hit this particular point, often because many applications will stop working before that due to developers discontinuing support effectively rendering the phone useless. I ran into this problem because I kept my phone around due to some images stored on it (well, now that's lost forever).

Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code" upon deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible integration"(?)?

Setting that aside, it seems it not every possible combination needs official support, but rather that providing an open or documented way for motivated users or communities to build upon or repurpose devices would be beneficial. Many projects exist precisely because tech companies allowed or at least tolerated community-driven solutions.

It's less about expecting everything to be effortless for the original manufacturer, and more about avoiding deliberate restrictions that prevent the community from extending a device's useful lifespan.

As a different engineer than the one you where replying to, I can say that yes, there is a substantial difference between the two. What the original comment was likely referring to with unlock codes, is the ability of unlocking a smartphone's bootloader so that one is able to install custom ROMs. But this is very different from providing support for said ROMs. A company can totally say: "here's the unlock code, but you use this under your sole responsibility, we will void your warranty if you do this". Being able to install custom ROMs at the cost of losing the warranty is a compromise I'm willing to accept: one can still wait for the warranty to expire and then install custom ROMs.

The world learned this circa-1900.

Neither the free market nor the current regulation in the US operates in favour of the citizenry.

They served us okay enough right up until Reagan decided that monopolies would be fine if they "benefited the consumer", as if that isn't a trivially stupid concept to anyone who has dealt with any system ever. Thanks to Reagan's admin, we allowed companies to nakedly take aggressive control of any market they want as long as they pretended they wouldn't raise prices.

We need to be less accepting of mergers and acquisitions too. If Google can just throw an absurd amount of money at any startup competitor to kill competition, it doesn't matter that it's not efficient, what human being will turn down $100 million just to stop competing? "Acquihires" are an anti-competitive practice

A company just having a lot of cash on hand can purposely pervert markets if you let them.

Conservatives complain about "punishing winners" but if you want a market to stay competitive, and therefore allow market forces to actually function, you cannot HAVE a "winner", or at least you can't let someone win so comprehensively that their resources end up warping the market just like a lot of mass warps spacetime. You must ensure that any company can be threatened by upstarts.

If you're only using it for on-device tasks then you're probably fine, although at that point the benefits of updating a ROM are probably marginal

This is enough for absolutely everything except Google Wallet/Pay.

I'm fine with that.

Not a mobile dev. Why can't you switch your backend from AWS to Azure or Hetzner?

Early in the 20th century, the telephone network was NOT an open standard. You had to ask AT&T to come to your home and wire a new telephone into THEIR network, and you weren't allowed to do anything else with that network. Opening that network up allowed us to build good modems (instead of relying on acoustic couplers which had abysmally low data rates due to bad quality coupling), build things like fax machines etc.

Open standards with open networks is a driving force to innovation. The internet is another one. We should be pushing very hard for basic rights to interact with networks and infrastructure.

If the power companies had the kind of control that we've given """Tech"" businesses over their "networks", you wouldn't be allowed to plug anything "unapproved" by a business into the wall. Your local utility could literally extract a tax on any product that needed electricity.

Open standards and laws that explicitly allow working in someone else's system for the purpose of Fair Use and interoperability are a requirement for continuous progress. A patent can encourage someone to make an initial investment into improvement, but the very moment they have any advantage the patent system means nobody else will be able to offer that kind of functionality for 20 years or so. Consider how long none of us were able to "Buy now" on any website other than amazon.com because of a stupid patent.

The entire PC ecosystem only exists because the law says that there was a way you could, legally protected, interact with someone else's intellectual property. It doesn't have to be easy, just possible. Clean Room reverse engineering is an insane endeavor, but without it, IBM would have strangled PCs as a platform in the crib, because that would be more profitable a business than what we have now.

If we want technological advancement and the ability to buy what you want, use what you want, do what you want with what you buy, then we need to forcefully wrest control away from these big companies who would really prefer to maintain tyrannical control over their "platforms" because it's just more profitable.

Stuff like the Digital Markets Act does that.

We should also abolish copyrights, because forcing companies to respect my IP is an ideological stance.

Trademarks are gone too, because you can't force a company to not trample my trademark and abuse my brand position without forcing an ideology on them.

The real answer is because this is a ton of work for very little customer benefit and creates tons of headaches to solve a mostly theoretical problem. It's not worth it to anyone involved.

DMA seems like a no-brainer for those that support users’ freedom. Since DMA came into effect almost two years ago, can anyone comment on its effectiveness?

Side note, I’m glad the EU takes normal people’s rights seriously. Wish the US was a leader on this too.

I'm so glad you asked, because I wrote an entire website about it: https://doesioshavesideloadingyet.com/

Executive summary: Epic Games benefits greatly from the DMA, but powerusers and smaller developers don't get much benefit. This is due to Apple's lackluster compliance measures that are currently being investigated and may be deemed illegal.

We might hear another update from the EU rather soon though: https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/10/report-apple-will-be-fined-by...

I really hope that the DMA does not go down in history as a failed experiment, because that will be a huge loss for open platforms as a whole.

One suggestion for an addition to the section on FOSS: Related to the issue of not being able to modify the source of apps we use, we also can't verify that an "open source" app on iOS is built from its claimed source code. We just have to trust the developer. This blocks true auditing of iOS apps for data privacy practices, something we know is needed given that the "privacy labels" are often deceptive https://archive.ph/Ak6qU. As such, this is a data security issue as much as a user freedom issue.

I'll probably end up adding it myself if you don't want to, because it's actually something I wanted to include originally but forgot to.

This is definitely a huge issue with the current implementation of DMA compliance. Apple's mandatory DRM encryption scheme as part of the notarization process doesn't just block reproducible builds and the improved security that those offer, but also means that third party app stores aren't capable of auditing the apps they offer in any way. If Apple lets something slip through their notarization review (which is not an impossibility, since it's happened on the App Store before), then the third party store carrying that app will be unfairly blamed for the incident.

The Apple Developer program is not intended as an option for end users to enable sideloading on their device, even if that is a side effect of joining it. It is only intended to allow developers to briefly test new builds of their own apps in a limited capacity before uploading them to the App Store (or third party stores in the EU). Apps "installed" this way expire after a certain length of time and you must ask Apple's cloud service for a new certificate each time that happens in order to keep using them. You're still tied to Apple indefinitely this way. If your developer account is terminated for whatever reason, or Apple decides to increase the price such that you can no longer afford your account, then suddenly you no longer have sideloading, and you no longer have access to any of the apps you previously sideloaded.

Therefore, I lump it into the same category as jailbreaking -- yes, you can argue that the existence of that means iOS already has sideloading, but it's not officially supported.

Sidenote: You don't need to spend $100/yr if you want to go the "unofficial sideloading" route; AltStore (Classic) is available for free: https://altstore.io/

I would argue that, while it's true that some of your rights are restricted by corporations, others are just there waiting for you to exercise them.

Use your freedom, take chances, write the word "porn" in HN without fear. Otherwise there's no point in demanding freedoms that we're too afraid to use.