[taneq]

OK, then how about instead of it being a national legal requirement, 90% of roads were privately owned toll roads and Ford convinced a consortium of toll road owners to standardize on their V2X component. So you can build a car without it but that car can't drive to anywhere you want to go.

[joshuamorton]

But again, that still doesn't work, because it's not 90% of toll roads. Like, keep in mind, in this analogy, Ford owns a bunch of roads, and they're all free to travel on. And of course there's also Honda (Microsoft: PlayRead) and BMW (Apple: FairPlay) with their own exclusive components that serve the same purpose, and some municipalities choose to use those instead, or to allow vehicles that use any. Or, most of the municipalities (in concrete terms, the vast majority), don't pass any laws at all.

For your analogy to make sense, the following would need to be true:

1. Apple and Microsoft didn't have competing (and fairly widely used) alternate DRM solutions

2. The average website required DRM to access it.

Without those, this is nothing more than dystopian fanfiction.