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by doctorwho42
728 days ago
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"we don't have a fundamental right to own and use computers." - 15 years ago, I would probably have agreed with this statement. But in the modern technological world, without access to computers you are unable to engage with a large number of services, both private and public services. So as a citizen, it is your right to access publicly funded services, right? So then by extension, the tools to access those services should be a fundamental right in a modern technological society. And moreso, you should have the right to own those tools outright without molestation by large corporate entities... Fuck, Microsoft isn't even a large corporation... It is a behemoth, 3.3 Trillion market cap! I think they, and their competitors, could stand to be saddled with some more regulation to insure a baseline OS for the citizenry of this county, and other countries. It's not like it's going to hurt their profit margins that much to comply! |
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Hah, well I'm definitely on the same page with this part! Companies shouldn't be given such massive legal cover that they can accumulate this level of wealth and power.
That said, I'm still not so sure I agree with computers being a fundamental right. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and for something fundamental it really should be something that can't be taken from you, aka inalienable rights in my opinion. Life in the US is certainly harder without a computer today, but is it really a right that needs to be legally enshrined?
Would this logic extend similarly to cars, phones, or air conditioning? They're all in the category of items I think everyone ought to have access to, but I don't think they're so fundamental to human life that governments must enforce that access.
I'm big on small governments in general though. I may just be seeing slippery slope here when that isn't warranted.