This isn't about privacy. Not directly anyway. This is about your right to have control of your own property.
You make a fair point though; the case does need to be made as to why this is a market failure and not just consumer choice working as expected. Why _do_ consumers tolerate manufacturers retaining ultimate control of consumer's property after the sale? It certainly doesn't seem to be that important to them. Maybe greater awareness of the issue would help somewhat?
> Why _do_ consumers tolerate manufacturers retaining ultimate control of consumer's property after the sale?
Just my opinion from many conversations with normies about this: It's because most of them don't know (the marketing material from these companies certainly doesn't advertise it), and the ones who do know don't care because they wouldn't be able to (technical knowledge) or want to root/unlock and utilize the capabilities.
> the ones who do know don't care because they wouldn't be able to (technical knowledge) or want to root/unlock and utilize the capabilities
This is a good point. Some of that is perhaps self-perpetuating: Why root if there's nothing you can do with root? And why develop stuff you can do with root if there's nobody who can use it? If there weren't so much active suppression of software freedom by manufacturers maybe the situation would change and the benefits of consumers having full control of their devices would be more apparent.
And ironically, it was the jailbreakers who demonstrated to Apple why the company needed to add third-party apps to its platform that originally didn't allow them.
Agree fully. Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. I accept the risk or tradeoff of Apple or MS spying on me. It’s not that, but the right to repair, to tinker, to hack. Those things have brought us so much interesting wonderful things. My entire generation (millennial) has superior tech literacy to both those that came before and after (no shade to the older gen - some of you are better than us, but with millennials it’s so much more widespread than eg gen X). Many younger gens never use ”real” computers (only tablet & phone). The gilded age was an anomaly, and is over.
> the case does need to be made as to why this is a market failure and not just consumer choice working as expected
I swear this consumer choice navel gazing will be the death of innovation. The US is obsessed with this narrative, that the magic market hand will self-correct, without any justification or scrutiny. Yes, consumer choice is necessary, but not sufficient. Just look at the developments in tech over the last decade+. I don’t have the solution but anyone who’s not entirely lost in dogma should be able to see the failures.
Market failures do happen, so I'm not claiming consumer choice is the perfect solution in every case. But consumers aren't stupid either; if this _were_ a mainstream concern the market _would_ self-correct. But it hasn't self-corrected on this issue, because most consumers don't really care that much. So I think you have to carefully consider why that is before you start thinking you know what they want better than than they do and eliminating certain choices by government decree.
There are costs to any regulation, and lots of possible unintended consequences. So even though I'm personally a strong advocate for user control and software freedom, I'm wary of acting without strong justification and careful consideration of the underlying reasons behind the status quo.
> I accept the risk or tradeoff of Apple or MS spying on me.
For what it's worth, I do think this issue has indirect effects on privacy. If you have ultimate control of the software on your device, you can use that control in ways that help protect your privacy. Otherwise you're limited to whatever protections the manufacturer decides to grant you.
There are lots of similar positive possible downstream effects of software freedom, which is why I think this is an issue worth serious consideration despite my misgivings.
> if this _were_ a mainstream concern the market _would_ self-correct.
The underlying premise here is that the alternative is available for consumers to choose, i.e. that you can buy something which is otherwise equivalent to an iPhone but supports third party app stores or installing a third party OS. But that isn't the case.
What you get instead is e.g. Fairphone, which has the specs of a $200 phone but costs $800 and if you actually have root your bank app might break etc. And still many people buy it. So all you can conclude from this is that the price the mass market places on freedom is less than $600 plus some non-trivial usability issues, not that they value it at zero and don't care about it at all.
On top of this, it's a threshold issue. If the median phone was rooted, people would develop apps that need root. When the percentage is some low single digit if not a fraction of a percent, they don't, and then taking the trade offs of a phone that can be rooted isn't buying you what it should because you need a critical mass in order to achieve the expected benefits, but you need the benefits in order to achieve the critical mass. This is the sort of situation where a mandate can get you over the hump.
> There are costs to any regulation, and lots of possible unintended consequences.
A good way to handle this is through anti-trust, because then you can do things like exempt any company with less than e.g. 5% market share. That means not Apple or Google or Samsung, but if there is any major problem with the rule then the market can work around it by having 20+ independent companies each provide whatever it is that people actually want. Meanwhile that level of competition might very well solve the original problem on its own, because now a couple of them start selling unlocked devices without any countervailing trade offs and that's enough to make the others do it.
You make a fair point though; the case does need to be made as to why this is a market failure and not just consumer choice working as expected. Why _do_ consumers tolerate manufacturers retaining ultimate control of consumer's property after the sale? It certainly doesn't seem to be that important to them. Maybe greater awareness of the issue would help somewhat?