[troyvit]

This talk from Cory Doctorow made the rounds on HN when it happened:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.

[mikkupikku]

Brilliant idea, my appreciation for Doctorow has grown even more than before.

[dehrmann]

Except it's already possible to install a third-party app store or OS on Android devices. The process isn't trivial, but it's officially supported.

[mikkupikku]

Haven't you heard? Google is changing their traditional policy on """side loading""" apps and are, quite soon from now, planning to lock the whole thing down and make users submit to anal probing to opt out. Android has been good but times are changing and we need to stop trusting old institutions.

[CalRobert]

That's cool, but on a practical level, can I generate whatever the APK equivalent for iOS is and just give it to my friends with iPhones?

[SirMaster]

Yes. They will have to reload the app every 7 days, but yes.

[rescbr]

> Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

The US parking an aircraft carrier nearby so the crew can enjoy a sunny vacation.

Or meddling with elections.

Or both.

[vincnetas]

I doubt this would work for the better. As we have recently seen when carriers got parked near Iran.

[troyvit]

That second one is already happening.

[SllX]

Or: a guy who is anti-copyright is performing an angle shoot to see if he can get some legislators to bite.

The EU taking staunchly anti-American positions and targeting American businesses looking for a way to “legally” rob them blind is probably not going to work out for them in the long run.

[troyvit]

Not rob them blind, just rob them a tiny bit to make up for a generation's worth of extortion.

[SllX]

So rob American businesses blind, but say you didn’t, but if you did, they had it coming anyway because of an unsubstantiated flimsy moral justification that disregards the purchasing choices of the EU citizenry, businesses and governments?

[benoau]

What is not substantiated?

Practically everything the EU DMA/DSA addresses was highlighted in the "House Antitrust Report on Big Tech" back in 2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/06/technology/ho...

But if that's not enough, since then:

Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.

Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.

Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.

Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.

[cookiengineer]

You are free to not trade with EU citizens then. Nobody forces you to accept their money.