That's not at all what the lefty geeks learned by reading Chomsky or what the righty geeks learned by reading Heinlein.
All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it!
Well, that was all very foolish, because they mistook government uninterest in something for the equivalent of government being powerless to control it, and when governments did start taking an interest in something, it turns out that protocols and algorithms are no defense against the realities of political power. It is to the field of politics, and not the field of technology, that one must turn in order to increase collective freedoms. Individual freedom can be increased by obtaining money or making lots of friends, but collective freedom cannot be increased this way, it can only be increased by organizing and influencing government.
Remember the people who, after the invention of the phone, insisted that it was a nice trick but probably only useful for a few businessmen with dictation needs?
Yeah, they all had to change their tone at some point, under the shame of having been wrong for so long.
But that's the underlying problem here. Apple isn't a standardized protocol or a distributed system. It's a monolithic chokepoint.
You can't do this with a PC. Dell and HP don't retain the ability to push software to hardware they don't own after they've already sold it and against the will of the person who does own it.
People pointed out that this would happen. Now it's happening. Qué sorpresa.
Hell, Dell has shipped more than one bug that allowed attackers administrator-level access or worse, I wouldn't put it past them to come up with some kind of asinine feature that not only lets them push new software/drivers/whatever to the machine, but lets attackers do so as well.
If they did that, people would wipe their device and not reinstall the Dell software. Many people do this already as soon as they buy the device.
The internet and its design and associated protocols were designed to work around external forces - a nuclear attack or natural disaster. It was never designed to be government-proof. People who thought that would be the case were being idealistic and naive.
If you want real change in the world, as you said, you have to affect the political world, which is an option available to any citizen or corporation who can spend millions on lobbyists.
Not sure everyone has gotten the memo yet.
Convenience and fashion tend to trump security and principles for most people. (Oftentimes, I'm one of those people as well, though I try not to be. It's exhausting to be an activist 100% of the time. But let's keep at it!)
For additional fun, strike a deal with the #2 non government owned carrier in whichever country you do this to. Offer the iPhone at a special rate for a few months. They would kill the government telco while selling record numbers of phones with free publicity. And at the same time scare any other government into not trying this kind of stunt with Apple ever again.
Then there's China; 17% of Apple's global revenue, $43.7bn. I don't think shareholders would much appreciate that.
> the public in India would either put pressure on their government or buy iPhones via import websites
The iPhone had 2.97% market share in India in April 2021, down from a high of 3.54% in June 2020. I don't think the people who wanted to buy iPhones but couldn't would be able toput any significant amount of political pressure on politicians.
Rich people would just import them from somewhere else like they always have before, and everyone else would switch to some available Android phone that had the modifications that the government wanted.
This made me think of the Butlerian Jihad in Dune:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
I'd say the typical remedy that societies have adopted for these sorts of things is legislation, though regulatory capture[1] is an issue that blocks the way.
This makes me very sad.
I just feel so lost and powerless these days, I don't know how much longer I can go on when every piece of technology I own is working against me - tools designed to serve a ruling class instead of the consumer. I don't like it one bit.