[EMIRELADERO]

God, all this sounds like a nightmare. I can't wait for laws that prohibit platforms/software from refusing service/content to users on the basis of the level of control they have over devices used to interact with it.

Dark times.

[mike_hearn]

Users love this stuff. It lets them buy cheap consoles that are sold below cost and subsidised by game royalties. Heavy gamers subsidise light gamers, and both can effectively "pay off" the true cost of the hardware over time as they buy titles. So it's a bit like zero-interest credit.

Also it eliminates cheating in multiplayer games, and users love that too.

And finally it stops gamers who play by the rules and buy games from feeling like mugs when their mates are playing for free, because there's no piracy.

You think users are going to vote to end all that? They already voted with their feet and embraced consoles on a massive scale. Both console and mobile gaming dwarfs PC gaming.

[EMIRELADERO]

Consider privacy. One might say "Users love this stuff. They get complex and effective services for free, all in exchange for contributing their data towards ads. Purchasers and advertisers subsidize light users who just consume the content."

And yet, we got laws like GDPR on the ideological basis that personal data is above the concept of "market" and about the individual, period. Your business model be damned.

The same thing should happen here. Both the complete control over all parts/SoCs of a device, and the right to the lack of negative consequences for choosing to exercise that control (such as being second-class citizens on the platform that runs on that device in terms of content/service availability) are paramount to a digital free society, and should be regulated as such, putting them above the concept of "market", just as privacy was.

[tptacek]

These same platform controls allow Apple to restrict user data collection from apps. Meanwhile: the notion of a "digital free society" isn't a thing.

[EMIRELADERO]

I'd much prefer governments use their force of law to make those tracking practices impossible (for anything that isn't an outright criminal enterprise) than a private entity making them technically difficult.