[jsmith12673]

Your conclusion strikes me as a bit defeatist. Managed systems might be 'better' for users now, but in the long term, they leave users with almost no agency, and that becomes a great opportunity for companies to abuse their position of power.

I also thing think that saying that something is annoying is dismissing what is actually a pretty dark pattern. What comes to mind is how modern day censorship works the internet. If you outright block someone's ability to visit a example.com, they will spot the censorship and try to find workarounds. If on the other hand, you simply introduce a 5% packet loss to example.com, people will blame the _website_ and not potential censorship.

What's to stop Microsoft for adding another 5 minutes of hassle to install chrome or firefox? You couldn't sue them for it, but it would be enough to destroy every other browser on the market.

[Godel_unicode]

> how modern day censorship works the internet.

It sounds like you're talking about something specific, are there examples of this happening that you can point to?

[chrchang523]

This sounds like a reference to the Great Firewall of China. (Though, on second thought, the GFW disrupts much more than 5%.)

[gruez]

There's two parts, I believe. One is the outright blocking of certain websites. The other is the throttling of every foreign website because the exchange points coming in/out of china are always congested. If both netflix and comcast's streaming service are similar in price and catalog, but netflix is always buffering because comcast is throttling netflix (intentionally or otherwise), then you might be inclined to go with comcast just for less hassle.

[zenexer]

Or because the average person is more likely to blame Netflix than Comcast in that scenario.