I can also see that companies should be required to release schematics of the products and documentation for any file formats etc. they use, so that when you save a project from a given program you should be able to convert it to another format. Companies should also be prohibited from using AI as customer services.

In many ways it's actually way more diverse now than it's ever been, just that some of these players are not making their innovations generally available but rather keeping them inhouse.

I feel the barrier has been high for quite some time, Intel was/is a monster that is occassionally caught napping. Maybe they'll wake up again and pull something big out of the hat, turn into a IAAS company as well maybe.

To be honest all of this seems like a reasonably decent competive market compared to the old days, we seem to have collectively forgotten the decades of wintel.

The big companies have no real problem complying with the regulations, it's quite clear that consumers don't actually give a damn. All you've now succeeded in doing is making sure any startup has a tonne of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through to get it right.

What you need to do is identify where a transaction has not been made between two parties for fair recompense. One potential area is to say that without adequate repair cover you are now forced to dispose of your electronics and pay for the safety disposal so that it does not pollute the environment for everyone else. Then a consumer might see the need for repair rights and make an informed value decision.

Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical.

As an anecdotal example; circa 2011 the australian goverment brought in legislation to make portable A/C units more efficient. Great, right? Wrong, the government in it's infinite ineptitude managed to word so that it only effected dual vent portable A/C units and left single vent A/C units unaffected. Instead of making dual vents more energy efficient the companies pulled all dual vents from the market and now you can only get single vents which are woefully inefficient. This is not the companies faults, they did exactly what you would expect them to do. The government fixed the legislation 11 months ago but unfortunately we can still not get dual vent A/C at all in Australia.

I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head.

Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in?

It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up.

I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".

$vendor shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to anybody

I would argue that a lot of consumers _do_ value it, but they don't know enough to ask about that up front.

Most people want to buy a thing, then use that thing, and when it breaks they reasonably assume that they should be able to get it fixed if they'd like. Cars work this way, appliances work this way, etc.

I think the reason why people don't ask for this up front is that

(1) most people would assume they have the right to repair (and thus don't think to ask) and/or

(2) life is short, and we shouldn't need an advanced degree specializing in a particular category of products in order to know all the ins and outs of buying one :)

I don't think it's that simple at all. There are lots of small reasons people right now act the way they do which in the aggregate makes it look as though they don't value repairability. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer a world where repair was easy and cheap. It also doesn't mean that a world where repairs are easy and cheap isn't preferable to one where it isn't, in a bigger perspective (environmental, for one).

Hmmm... Ok... I think get it now! Regulations are always bad and never good. Wow, it's so simple. Thank you for this valuable and insightful information.

Why do consumers need the government to enforce child labor laws? FDA regulation? OSHA? These lessons are written in blood.

Yes, you might need to work on the regulation in order to get it just right but "who cares, whatever" is not acceptable unless we want to live in an effectively-communist world with a few vertically-integrated corporations setting all the rules.

[1]: https://repair.eu/

"The vote means that the European Commission now has the full support of the Parliament in moving forward with the development of laws [...]"

Chip-OS dyads like wintel. Platforms duopolies & oligopolies. Neutrality & commodification vs lock-in dynamics. Public or free standards as an alternative to platforms. etc.

A lot of these dynamics have recognisably repeating in the computing industry (also telecom & media) for 4 decade.

OTOH, scale is a quality unto itself, and as this article suggests... Vertically integrated computing is very much a megacorp endeavour. I think the difference here is the scale of these companies.

Also, in most world states, large corporations are able to threaten leaving - stopping activity in the country - which can be quite a hit to the local economy for smaller states and larger corporations.

Another point which hinders your suggestions is the imbalance between world powers, especially the US (and to some extent the EU and China) - so that if one or several of those are beholden to corporate interests, then the others, or world-wide bodies, will find it very difficult to mandate things, apply taxation etc.

Unlikely. Prior to incorporation, families were the operating unit of commercial and thus military and political activity. This pattern would resurrect itself: families, like corporations, can be immortal. That means they can plan and be trusted for the long term.

Note, too, that incorporation gives rise to charities, unions and independent lobbying groups like the Sierra Club. You lose those when you wipe out legal personhood.

After all, politicians in democracies should be responsible to their electorate, shouldn't they?

[1]: https://www.lepoint.fr/high-tech-internet/exclusif-comment-g...

[2]: https://www.lobbycontrol.de/2020/11/mit-harten-bandagen-wie-...

Unfortunately, I don't think we can say that they should.

I mean, in democratic ideology they should, but democratic state institutions, legal and organizational arrangements are not fashioned to achieve this outcome; and most democratic states were not, after all, created by the mass of people setting up those arrangements. Rather, elite groups and powerful interests set such states up, with democratic elections being a mechanism for legitimizing the new regime among the masses, or a concession to public pressure.

If a big American corporation is transferring lots of money from Europe to America while engaging in some sketchy behaviour, Europe might be more enthusiastic about clamping down on that than America. For both financial reasons and due to different political priorities.

It's not like Europe could unilaterally reverse Google's purchase of Youtube or Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp.

Companies are for the benefit of people.

When companies become a detriment to public health and wellbeing they need to be regulated.

Until underlying reward mechanisms change political will won't have a chance to build.