What are our alternatives? I’ve said in posts before that legislating against each anti-consumer product or feature is a fool’s errand. The legislature cannot keep up the rate at which corporate entities produce consumer-unfriendly products. I also don’t trust it to represent citizens rather than corporate donors, at least here in the US.
Pitchforks? Seriously though, your comment is way too defeatist. Legislature has worked for centuries for this problem. Imperfectly, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But if all else fails, giant corporations are eventually going to get the good ol' pitchforks up their butt.
To the contrary, I think settling for a mechanism that (maybe) cleans up the damage after it’s done is defeatist.
Re:Renting Horsepower
by NineStarPoint on Thursday May 04, 2023 @08:49PM
(#35824047)
This isn’t a case where you have to wait until after the damage is done though. Making a blanket regulation of “you can’t sell a physical good that has its capabilities artificially limited to create price brackets”, or something similar, would work in advance of people trying to sell such products in the US market.
For example, there is always going to be a huge barrier to entry for automakers. They need to invest an enormous amount of time and money in design, factories, raw materials, labor, etc before they can deliver an actual car. This barrier protects automakers from feeling the full repercussions of their anti-consumer practices because it is extremely difficult for a new pro-consumer competitor to enter the market.
When we remove that assumption of perfect competition, the whole free market theory starts to fall apart. A well functioning free market requires power to be balanced between all parties, otherwise whoever has the most power can end up corrupting it and using their power advantage to grab even more money and/or power.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition