[matheusmoreira]

Yup. Only way we can possibly win is by writing computing freedom into actual law. Make it literally illegal for them to use cryptography to violate our freedoms. Service providers should be required by law to interoperate with our computers, no matter what software we choose to run. If we reverse engineer their little apps and make free software versions, they should have to suck it up. We used to be able to buy whatever phone, modem or router we wanted and hook it up to the network with no issues. Software should work the same way.

[doctor_radium]

I'm thinking about a corollary to Net Neutrality (which is allegedly coming back thanks to the new Biden-appointed FCC commissioner) which states that public web sites need to be accessible by the public. I've ranted about this a few times on HN. This isn't about working around bugs and quirks in umpteen different versions of umpteen different browsers, but making sure we don't start actively coding hard stops again: "Your browser is too old" messages, endless Captchas, purposely giving one browser a clearly worse or even unusable experience. Incompetence would be embarrassing but not illegal. Whenever I find the time, I really want to send the FCC a registered mail packet with my proposal and lots of examples of why this is already necessary.

And yes, the web sites will need to suck it up. You can't choose your visitors...which may occassionally be a bot or screen scraper.