Comment by qingcharles

No, Money, Votes, etc has value because the general public gives it value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Votes are ultimately a method of control not an inherent power unto themselves.

Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and the underlying reality.

EU Chat Control would like a word as well

Ohioans need to elect better reps then, don't they?

Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them.

Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip.

Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy. We've done it before and we can do it again.

Laws are meaningless de jure. Especially where megacorps are concerned, the de facto law (ie the only one that matters) is the text, multiplied by the enforcement mechanism, multiplied by the political will to enforce, multiplied by the 10-15 year process of the megacorps draining their legal warchests into challenges and appeals. Then, after all that, maybe… you get a change to corporate behavior.

The laws in this country are primarily written by and for large corporations. They’re not going to meaningfully practically restrain them just because something got passed.

You are not going to get the guy at 7-11 or the cashier at Target who just bought a PS5 for her son to boycott watching movies on it. Boycotts only work if it is demonstrably going to make their life worse if they don't. Losing access to a movie that interested you 15 years ago when you were still in high school is not one of those things.

I gave up on Sony for life when they tried to install a rootkit on my computer from an audio CD years ago and I see no reason to change.

There's a reason why they teach the prisoner's dilemma on day 1 of business school: a group which is more fragmented has less power. From the consumer perspective, this is why monopolies are bad and this is why boycotts don't work. From the slimy businessman perspective, this is why monopolies are good and boycotts are the only way consumers should be allowed to push back. Boycotts are empirically understood to be an ineffective strategy -- which, of course, is usually exactly what the people proposing them as an alternative to legislation are usually after.

Boycotts don't work nearly as well nowadays because

a) Consumers don't have enough money already, so they're both stressed out and getting fewer things for themselves. These combine to mean that they're less likely to be willing to give up what little luxuries they have left, even if you're just asking them to substitute one media property for another.

b) The companies being targeted are just too damn big. The consolidation that began in the '80s has reached truly ludicrous levels in 2026, meaning that the company can just...ignore drops in profits for months or even years while consumers get worn out.

For the love of god please understand 80% of people are trying to just get on day by day. They don't give a shit about any of this. They probably don't even realize it's happening. Some subset of them might be hit by this but most just don't care.

The point of a government in society is for people who give a shit to guide this kind of thing.

Also, corporate bullshit such as this should be stigmatized.

> But what we really need is a massive boycott

Is it? What’s the most effective boycott you can think of ever achieved?

[dead]

> In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital.

By this logic, in consumerism power comes from consumers, but maybe it's more complicated than that?

Not to defend this, just to further observe the different nature of their marketing -- games also haven't historically had similar "rent" options in the first place. Timed demos are a newer trend, demos in general have usually been smaller sections of the content, and they typically aren't something you're paying for.

or lease? or... There's probably a dozen words to mean that same word.

I think we've also moved towards subscriptions as apps become clients for a backend service.

EG. A mapping app that includes a one time bundle of maps that don’t get updated can be sold as a one time purchase. If you provide continuous updates, which most people expect now, pulling off a one time purchase business model is HARD. The other option is versioned access or time limited support, which is really just a subscription model by a different name. That said I wish versioned access was still a thing. Photoshop CS is still fine for what I want, I’m happy to pay for an upgrade when it makes sense, but a continuing subscription to software that hasn’t substantially changed in a decade sucks.

Is this an official definition defined in law?

So they avoided having a "rent" button by using the technically correct "add to cart", "continue to payment" instead of "buy this game", "buy all games in cart", and just have a separate sentence in small grey text that is confusing to most people.

Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.