Yep. Buying iDevices is the libertarian dream of buying into private regulatory environments.

I hate it, but it's the best we have until/unless government improves our terribly weak consumer protection & privacy laws. I really hope the option's not taken away, nor Apple's position as a regulator significantly weakened, until/unless government steps in and solves the problems Apple's currently solving. At that point, sure, break them up, ban app store platform monopolies, whatever, fine, go for it. But please not yet.

> Buying iDevices is the libertarian dream of buying into private regulatory environments.

I bet Libertarians would love to hear that, but even they probably wouldn't put their money into a company that has time-and-time-again been proven to be in the Governments pocket via PRISM, iCloud data requests and Greykey Bruteforcing. Sounds like a libertarian nightmare to me: you give your data to a private company, but they immediately betray you and share that information with the government.

...that of course doesn't mean that Apple shouldn't be regulated into the ground. It does imply that they won't be regulated though, as long as egregious data collection continues to appease our private and national interests.

The GP didn't claim this was a perfect or even good solution though: just the best currently available. That your vendor will sell you out to law enforcement/intelligence agencies is a given for ALL large tech companies. None has a clean record in this regard. I also wouldn't be super confident that an EFF approved stack would actually keep you safe from a nation state interested in your stuff.

What you _can_ buy from apple though is i) services where your data are not monetised to the highest bidder and ii) being part of a non-ad-supported culture which seems like a prerequisite for a functioning public discourse and political economy.

A libertarian dream would have free markets, and the article above shows that whatever market that Apple operates in is nothing like a free market

Apple’s monopolies and monopolies are the natural “be careful of what you wish for” of libertarianism. Without regulation and government action monopolies are a guarantee. (And yes with regulation they are possible but can be broken up with enough pressure)

A field so monopolized that every publisher of moderate size is attempting to replicate it? The assumptions for monopolies of the past was that there was a size of investment which meant nobody would throw money at trying to compete at a loss. For better or worse we are beyond that with venture capital, demonstrated by the plagues of foo-sharing and atreaming services. Frankly it seems that people think that tantruming over not being able to have it both ways and throwing the "M" word meaninglessly is how you get what you want, with sense and fact not parties to the conversation.

It still is a free market, you can buy an android if you don't want apple's privacy "guarantees"

“The USSR is a free market, you can just move to America if you want to buy something that isn’t for sale there”

I don't get the analogy. Can you break it down for me?

The cost of switching matters (and is talked about in the article as well). If there is a significant cost, then that means less competition, and it makes it hard to categorize them as the same market. Compare the friction of switching between a Samsung TV and a Sony one, vs the friction of switching between an iPhone and an Android. Most people wouldn't mind the former, but would mind the latter

I can only assume they mean Apple will send you and your family to a gulag if they catch you leaving or your neighbors says you don’t have a picture of Steve over your mantle. Otherwise if that is not what literally is happening, that comment is really trivializing the tragedy of what happened to millions.

If an iPhone owner wants to use an app that Apple has banned from the App Store, they cannot simply purchase it. Instead they must make the widely disproportionate move of spending many hundreds of dollars on an android phone. In practice almost no one will switch phones just for a single app.

Similarly, a resident of a communist country could theoretically leave and buy things elsewhere, but in practice almost no one will because of the high overhead of moving countries.

“Using an iPhone is basically like the Gulag” - HackerNews

What a terrible analogy. You are saying it’s as easy to move to the US from other countries as changing your phone?

They are just pointing out that friction to change matters, and if the friction is high enough, it's not really a free market