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Ignoring monopoly positions, censorship concerns, security research, industry innovation and many other important considerations that go into these kinds of ide
by jchw 4y ago
Ignoring monopoly positions, censorship concerns, security research, industry innovation and many other important considerations that go into these kinds of ideas, I'd like to present another angle; I think even just the eWaste concern alone is enough to suggest that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo should also have to provide the end user the ability to load their own code with relatively few restrictions. I actually don't see why game consoles are special and I don't really care about current industry norms or razor thin margins. The industry we have now doesn't need to remain financially sustainable as-is; that is not a condition that is set in stone. In fact, I'd argue that often times making progress literally requires this kind of disruption sometimes.
Nobody ever sat down and decided that what Nintendo did with 10NES was a good idea; it was just legally viable and nobody stopped it. It became normal without any concerted decision that it should be, just the lack of any strong enough force opposing it. I don't think that means that everything must continue this way forever. It is possible to realize that the implications are bad.
Even that said, hackers like to think in absolute and concrete terms and theory. In practice, phones are extremely important, telling people to vote for their wallet doesn't work, and there are basically no phones that offer a good set of trade-offs today because the market is not incentivized to produce it. Consumers pay $1000 for a phone and can't install a web browser. It is disturbing that people who are on a website with "Hacker" in the name can see this as a good thing. (Not that you are necessarily. But still, I see it too often.)
- gjsman-1000 4y agoDefining what business models are legal and illegal, based on profit margins, is not a road we should go down in my opinion. Plus, some game consoles (like the Nintendo Switch) are profitable even if nobody buys a game because Nintendo prioritized that, and other game consoles become profitable in-and-of-themselves later in their lifecycle. This leads to all sorts of perverse incentives. If I'm Nintendo, I could sell my game console for $299 with some profit on Day 1 (like now), but then I would be forced to have an open store. Or, I could sell it for $269, take a initial loss, and have a closed store. It would simply made "game consoles shall be sold at a loss" the law, not opened things up. I think that would be atrocious. So... either game consoles can remain locked, or we simply declare game consoles cannot be sold locked.
- pas 4y agoCutting up the space of all possible business models is exactly the job of these authorities, to solve these coordination problems that arise from raw market forces, that only wants to optimize for a local maxima. (And the companies that try to take certain externalities into consideration are disadvantaged, so they have a smaller market share than otherwise, which in many markets simply means zero ... see eg EVs, nuclear power plants, and other current big "revelations".)
- smoldesu 4y agoWell, the alternatives are: - let the free market create even more perverse incentives - let regulators use even more restrictive means of limiting innovation As someone who errs moderate on the economy, I'd prefer that we don't lean into either extreme. Neither one seems to work well.
- jchw 4y agoFWIW, I agree. It'd be nice if we gradually walked back the idea of selling computers with these kinds of limitations. Some lock down is going to be desirable in some situations, but it should be the exception rather than the norm.