Comment by throwaway14356
2 years ago
my mental analogy is this.
Say someone produces a reading chair. Now say the company desires to restrict, shape or dictate which books one is allowed to read while sitting in the chair.
One could argue they should have such rights but historically it is quite unusual.
Similarly, if you pay for the chair and put it in your home it is tempting to think you've purchased it and that you own and control it.
The tos could state that the company may at nay time introduce a monthly fee, render the chair unusable or force you to return it without providing a reason.
They may revoke the unisex version and force the user to choose a sex or limit the license to a single user.
It could introduce tools to measure the weight of the user and use that to determine a violation of the single user agreement.
A popular book vendor might require you own one of their competing reading chairs and disallow reading in other chairs.
The company building the house can also grant it self all kinds of privileges. You must buy compatible appliances. They can put some weird connectors on them with some drm logic. np
The only reason not to have such possibly wonderful eco systems imho is that we already have hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations.
If we are to use and make products it should be as simple as possible. Using your weight to check if you are the registered user is not the point to start fixing it. The law should simply state that chair and subscription are separate products.
I don’t think this analogy works because you could have bought the competing chair - which proponents of loudly claim is better than the Apple chair - and gotten similar service. As a matter of fact I’m told the competing chair is much better, and not only that it’s cheaper! And I’m an idiot for buying the Apple chair
Buy the competing chair. This is not a monopoly.
If you get the chance to dictate how the user of the chair uses it (without to much blowback) it would make good business sense.
If you can prevent manufacturers from gaining control over unrelated parts of the customers life it would make good sense as a law maker.
Can someone make a portable computer with networking a camera, mic and nothing else? It seems entirely possible.
Then there is no need for the chair maker to want a percentage of all food revenue eaten in the chair, no need to demand specific food vendors or demand they use a specific payment system they also happen to own. No need to control who you can talk to, which games you play.
There just isn't a need to allow it.
Also, in the analogy your chair comes with regular visits to do maintenance, improvements and add new features to your chair.
Also whenever you sit in the chair, there are real monetary costs to the chair maker.