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> Take a look at Amazon's DRM -- it doesn't matter if you as a consumer wake up one day and realize that there are negative consequences to being unable to port

> Take a look at Amazon's DRM -- it doesn't matter if you as a consumer wake up one day and realize that there are negative consequences to being unable to port your library to any other devices. You still can't do it. Because almost no one actually cares that you can't port your library to any other devices, Amazon's DRM is well known by now and they certainly don't mislead customers into thinking their books are DRM-free nor do they advertise library portability as a feature. The mechanism by which consumers "get that ability back" is by buying DRM free books if they're sick of DRM, but that hasn't and doesn't happen for most consumers even though they're completely free to do so. Most people are content with Amazon DRM, and when they aren't, any company that sells DRM-free books will make a killing. But no one makes a lot of money from DRM-free books because there is no widespread demand for it. It's ridiculous to suggest that consumers have been robbed of their ability to influence the market, they have always held all the cards. Companies only make money if consumers want what they make, and boy do they want it. If you have reason to believe Amazon is somehow preventing consumers from buying DRM-free books, I'd be happy to hear it. The kind of failures that markets can't solve themselves are typically ones of deception and coercion, show me that. > None of that is stuff that consumers on their own would prioritize, but they're market conditions that benefit everyone tremendously. Says you. I'll let consumers decide what's important and what market conditions are beneficial to them, thank you. > either people don't understand security/access at all and we shouldn't treat any of their purchasing decisions on this with reverence, or people are making a security decision not to trust phone manufactures when they uncheck that box, and we shouldn't shame them for having a different risk model than us. People don't need to understand security/access at all for their purchasing decisions to be legitimate. Do you need to be an expert in plumbing to know that you need a plumber? Do you need plumber skills to figure out that the wet & broken mess you've made by yourself suggests you need expert help? You can't conflate a consumer's knowledge of security risk with a consumer's knowledge of security itself. Security risks & benefits are really obvious: consumers notice when they or people they know get hacked & phished. They notice when their computer slows down to a crawl and starts injecting garbage into their screen. They especially notice when iPhones & Chromebooks have none of these problems. Knowing if a non-vetted program is safe to bypass regular security checkpoints? Consumers consistently and repeatedly fail that test almost every time they're given the opportunity. > How do you know that normal users don't just have a separate threat model than you and that they're willing to uncheck that box because they're consciously deciding to tolerate a greater rate of infection/malware than you find acceptable? I know because they switch to a more secure & locked down platform wherever they can. I know because they loudly complain that Android is full of malware and unvetted trash and then proceed to buy an iPhone. I know because the anger& confusion they lash out with when they fuck up their own security clearly indicate that they'd rather never deal with that ever again. The idea that most consumers were happy with the previously awful state of security is totally absurd when they fled those platforms en masse the first chance they could get.

danShumway 6y ago
> Most people are content with Amazon DRM, and when they aren't, any company that sells DRM-free books will make a killing. > If you have reason to believe Amazon is somehow preventing consumers from buying DRM-free books, I'd be happy to hear it. Look, we can get into the nitty gritty details, but if we're going to have this debate, you have to do some basic research online to see how Amazon is currently hurting the Ebook market, or how DRM is actually affecting markets and consumer choice at this moment. I will still assume you're coming into this from an honest perspective of inquiry, but you have to put in a little bit of work here, I'm not going to summarize the entire history of US antitrust for you. It's going to be very difficult to have a productive conversation if you don't understand how device/vendor lock-in works. Do you really not understand how holding people's purchased libraries captive prevents those people from moving to new devices or ecosystems? Do you really, honestly believe that a superior book ecosystem of any kind could spring up and Kindle owners would just say, "well fine, I'll throw away $200 of purchased Ebooks! It's no big deal." You don't think it affects consumer's book purchasing decisions at all that it's impossible to put Kobo books onto a Kindle or Amazon books onto a Kobo device without breaking a federal law? Please do some basic research about how DRM and platform lock-in works on Apple/Amazon devices. I heavily recommend reading some of Cory Doctorow's work, or looking at the history of how the DMCA/CFAA has been used to shut down market competitors via legal means instead of via competition, or into how Apple increases lock-in with their current product direction on things like SSO/subscriptions, credit card offerings, and proprietary device standards that competing companies are not able to interop with. Apple's current product strategy is to increasingly make it so that anyone who wants to buy a different phone must also throw away a substantial amount of sunk cost into app purchases, hardware that isn't allowed to work as well on other devices, social status (incoming Android messages are literally labeled differently in iOS), they may even be forced to cancel their current credit card. This is a really textbook example of how vendor lock-in works, you can find more detailed information online if it's something that you're actually curious about. ---- The way I see it, there are two fundamental problems I have with your point of view. A) I don't believe that customers magically become stupid or smart based on whether they're holding a smartphone or a credit card. I believe that people's decision making processes when using devices and purchasing devices are the same. B) I believe that if people actually want to do something, you (usually) shouldn't have to force them to do it. If people genuinely wanted to be in Apple's walled garden, Apple wouldn't need to lock the garden from the inside. It's one thing to argue that people are too stupid to make their own security decisions. It's one thing to argue that people are too stupid to prioritize long-term market effects. But it's ridiculous to argue that people want to be in a walled garden when literally every single opportunity you give them to turn it off or install apps from outside of it, they immediately do so. That is not the behavior of people who are happy with where they are. I don't know how to do my own plumbing. The reason you can tell that I'm happy to let other people make my plumbing decisions is because I haven't yet taken a hacksaw to my pipes. If every single opportunity to take apart my toilet I did so, you might reasonably conclude that I did want to do my own plumbing, however misguided my beliefs about my own abilities were. And if having a checkbox in settings labeled, "warning, you are definitely going to be infected by malware" doesn't prevent people from turning off security safeguards, you might reasonably conclude that they do want to manage their own security, however misguided their beliefs about their own abilities are. ---- > I know because they switch to a more secure & locked down platform wherever they can. This is a wildly simplistic model of how customer behavior actually works. There is a nontrivial percentage of Apple customers who switch to iOS because they're worried about their SMS message bubbles getting colored green. You can't seriously argue that those people are making a security decision. And in any case, this is all kind of moot because if you want to pretend the market perfectly reflects majority preferences, then people didn't flee Android en-mass. Apple holds a market majority on paid app downloads, but they don't hold a majority of market share on actual devices. The majority of users switched to Android. Of course, they probably switched to Android in no small part because of large price differences, not because of "openness", but if I'm correctly understanding your worldview it seems like we're not allowed to acknowledge things like that, we have to assume it was an ideological decision because the majority of the world wanted sideloading.

danShumway 6y ago

> Most people are content with Amazon DRM, and when they aren't, any company that sells DRM-free books will make a killing. > If you have reason to believe Amazon is somehow preventing consumers from buying DRM-free books, I'd be happy to hear it. Look, we can get into the nitty gritty details, but if we're going to have this debate, you have to do some basic research online to see how Amazon is currently hurting the Ebook market, or how DRM is actually affecting markets and consumer choice at this moment. I will still assume you're coming into this from an honest perspective of inquiry, but you have to put in a little bit of work here, I'm not going to summarize the entire history of US antitrust for you. It's going to be very difficult to have a productive conversation if you don't understand how device/vendor lock-in works. Do you really not understand how holding people's purchased libraries captive prevents those people from moving to new devices or ecosystems? Do you really, honestly believe that a superior book ecosystem of any kind could spring up and Kindle owners would just say, "well fine, I'll throw away $200 of purchased Ebooks! It's no big deal." You don't think it affects consumer's book purchasing decisions at all that it's impossible to put Kobo books onto a Kindle or Amazon books onto a Kobo device without breaking a federal law? Please do some basic research about how DRM and platform lock-in works on Apple/Amazon devices. I heavily recommend reading some of Cory Doctorow's work, or looking at the history of how the DMCA/CFAA has been used to shut down market competitors via legal means instead of via competition, or into how Apple increases lock-in with their current product direction on things like SSO/subscriptions, credit card offerings, and proprietary device standards that competing companies are not able to interop with. Apple's current product strategy is to increasingly make it so that anyone who wants to buy a different phone must also throw away a substantial amount of sunk cost into app purchases, hardware that isn't allowed to work as well on other devices, social status (incoming Android messages are literally labeled differently in iOS), they may even be forced to cancel their current credit card. This is a really textbook example of how vendor lock-in works, you can find more detailed information online if it's something that you're actually curious about. ---- The way I see it, there are two fundamental problems I have with your point of view. A) I don't believe that customers magically become stupid or smart based on whether they're holding a smartphone or a credit card. I believe that people's decision making processes when using devices and purchasing devices are the same. B) I believe that if people actually want to do something, you (usually) shouldn't have to force them to do it. If people genuinely wanted to be in Apple's walled garden, Apple wouldn't need to lock the garden from the inside. It's one thing to argue that people are too stupid to make their own security decisions. It's one thing to argue that people are too stupid to prioritize long-term market effects. But it's ridiculous to argue that people want to be in a walled garden when literally every single opportunity you give them to turn it off or install apps from outside of it, they immediately do so. That is not the behavior of people who are happy with where they are. I don't know how to do my own plumbing. The reason you can tell that I'm happy to let other people make my plumbing decisions is because I haven't yet taken a hacksaw to my pipes. If every single opportunity to take apart my toilet I did so, you might reasonably conclude that I did want to do my own plumbing, however misguided my beliefs about my own abilities were. And if having a checkbox in settings labeled, "warning, you are definitely going to be infected by malware" doesn't prevent people from turning off security safeguards, you might reasonably conclude that they do want to manage their own security, however misguided their beliefs about their own abilities are. ---- > I know because they switch to a more secure & locked down platform wherever they can. This is a wildly simplistic model of how customer behavior actually works. There is a nontrivial percentage of Apple customers who switch to iOS because they're worried about their SMS message bubbles getting colored green. You can't seriously argue that those people are making a security decision. And in any case, this is all kind of moot because if you want to pretend the market perfectly reflects majority preferences, then people didn't flee Android en-mass. Apple holds a market majority on paid app downloads, but they don't hold a majority of market share on actual devices. The majority of users switched to Android. Of course, they probably switched to Android in no small part because of large price differences, not because of "openness", but if I'm correctly understanding your worldview it seems like we're not allowed to acknowledge things like that, we have to assume it was an ideological decision because the majority of the world wanted sideloading.