
Apple doubles down on its right to profit from other businesses - dsr12
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/apple-doubles-down-on-its-right-to-profit-from-other-businesses/
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justjonathan
I remember in the 90s when I was first exposed to Richard Stallman’s ideology
of only using free software. At the time, It seemed crazy not to use free (as
in beer) software, but of course he was right in so many ways.

We now live in a world where most people’s primary computing devices are made
by only 2 companies. One of them has _complete_ control over what the device
owner can run, and the other has effective/de facto control over what the
device owner can run.

Say what you will about zealots, but they are looking out for problems before
they become problems...

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redis_mlc
FYI: for people in the know, what Stallman wrote 100% made sense at the time,
and we just faintly hoped he was wrong.

Of course, anybody familiar with US IP law knew that hope was very misplaced,
as a single company like Disney can lobby for federal copyright law to be
rewritten at will - it has been extended to 100+ years at this point to make
Mickey Mouse eternally exclusive.

What blind-sided even cynics are the non-competes on hair stylists and
sandwich-makers in the same town. These expose the true nature of business
owners to enslave their staff at every opportunity.

Amazon's lobbying to retain non-competes for professional staff (salaries over
$100k) in Seattle is another indicator.

(I have chosen to work in California for that reason.)

Make no mistake, corporations are waging a war to control the American
population, who don't even know they've been targeted yet. One of their most
effective weapons is arbitration of both employees and consumers. After all,
who pays the arbitration firm?

The only potential good news is that when courts get fed up enough, they
sometimes toss out one-sided non-competes and ToS links.

This happened in Canada a few decades ago. Insurance companies wrote more-and-
more clever policy language until the courts ruled that simplified language
was required so that the average consumer could understand the meaning.

(Note that the courts in Canada are scholarly and experienced appointees,
rather than lobbied and elected officials as in the US.)

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pdimitar
> _Would iOS apps ever have found as large an audience if they were all side-
> loaded bits of software instead of being organized, ranked, curated and
> featured in a built-in App Store?_

They probably would have found such a large audience without Apple / Google.
If something is genuinely useful then word-of-mouth and organic growth would
very likely get them exactly where they are today.

Plus, App Store is anything but organised and curated. You can literally
search for exact app name and get several other apps on top in the search
results. I fail to see how this is "organised" or "curated" (unless of course,
curated doesn't equal "pushing paid results to the top of search results" and
this is likely exactly what's happening).

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ThePowerOfFuet
Mandatory cookie wall? No thanks.

