Comment by jeroenhd
12 days ago
> If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.
I have twoo problems with this idea.
1. Users are extremely lazy and anything that doesn't work out of the box doesn't gain any commercial traction. See: Epic Games Store, Amazon App Store, F-Droid to some extent.
2. Apple already allows alternative app stores inside of Finland (the entire EU, actually). There's the issue of Apple's bullshit installation fees, of course, but with Epic covering those so far, cost doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to the proliferation of app stores.
While I'm all for an iPhone running free code, commercial interests for alternative app stores won't be what will bring forth these improvements.
The first problem is technical.
Jailbreaks aren't stopped by being ostensibly illegal to do. They're stopped by being a nigh-impossible attack conducted against an adversary that keeps hardening the systems against it.
Which is why the fight for unlocked bootloaders and software freedom is such an important fight. It's theoretically possible to create an "unbreakable lock" and forbid the users from having any control over the software forever.
Which is why user freedom must be legally mandated, and engineered into the hardware on the ground floor. You can't rely on being able to "hack the freedom in after the fact".
If it's legal to jailbreak an iPhone (assuming it's technically possible) there will be an ecosystem of companies that make the UX friction as low as possible for casual users.
What would worry me is that the US would probably start a big scale digital warfare operation against EU citizens as soon as technically possible.
Allowing people to own their devices and modify them can first foster creativity and competition, which can lead to the creation of standards, alternatives and businesses around that.
The current situation makes it impossible to create a business from modifying an existing product, you need to start from blank slates, making it hard to crack a walled-garden.