Comment by michaelmrose
4 years ago
Virtually everything you own that was sold in the US had a wide variety of terms set by the US government on your behalf on how it was constructed, advertised, and sold. The question was never if the government should set terms it is what terms.
You are also somehow envisioning the government as a separate entity having no relationship to the people as a whole that instead of literally already setting the entire ground rules in which our society exists somehow needs a very high bar to justify any interference whatsoever.
The government is all of us and the only justification it requires is the people's interests. 99.999% of people aren't chicken farmers so if they demand cleaner chicken farms so the chicken they eat are less likely to give them the shits then cleaner farms it is and those who who don't like it can situate their farms somewhere else.
99.999% of people aren't Nintendo executives so if the people are smart enough to demand hardware they actually own then Nintendo is free to exit the entire US market.
Pray we don't alter the deal further.
I can’t speak for other governments, but the US governments (both federal and state) derive their authority and their limitations from their contract with the people. You’d be hard pressed to find a constitutional scholar who believes the US Constitution stretches to grant the US government any power that it determines is in the people’s interests.
Notably, one of the most fundamental principles of US government is specifically the notion that the majority, even a supermajority, can’t infringe on the rights of a minority. We’ve screwed this up in plenty of cases, but that doesn’t suggest that the underlying goal is invalid and we should steer into the skid.
There is no right to unrestricted commerce. In many cases new restrictions don't even need new laws just new regulations drafted by bureaucracs defined in existing laws.
You seem to believe that one must reach backwards to the constitution in order to justify any new restrictions on your freedoms in a nation where we have happily redefined commerce within a state as subject to regulation based on the commerce clause. Let alone the general welfare clause.
In fact powers are so broadly construed that the only barrier is enumeration of a restriction in federal law and non violation of fundamental rights.
You have no more fundamental right to sell a locked down device than to build a store without proper fire exits. We didn't need to wait for fire exits to be built and vote with our feet.
How could I not have a right to sell a locked down device? Even Stallman doesn’t question the right of manufacturers to provide closed source / non-user-modifiable software on devices that operate as appliances. My alarm clock runs code to manage the menus / configure alarms / change brightness, but it’s implausible to suggest it’s illegal for the manufacturer to have built a locked down device.
People in this comment page keep drawing parallels between “a hardware device whose software I cannot modify” and things like fire code / health and safety laws. If you think there’s actually a line connecting those, draw it. I’m not seeing it.
3 replies →