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The usual concern with regulation is not the big players. It’s the smaller products and businesses that cease to exist because it’s too expensive to meet regul
by thrashh 3y ago
The usual concern with regulation is not the big players.
It’s the smaller products and businesses that cease to exist because it’s too expensive to meet regulations. Bad regulation raises the cost of entry into the market and strengthens the big players like Apple.
- asddubs 3y agoreleasing the firmware primarily would affect the chip makers, phone manufacturers generally do not write this code themselves.
- waboremo 3y agoNot sure how much weight this really has in a market such as mobile phones in which additional external competitors are never going to become a reality.
- wongarsu 3y agoOnePlus was a nobody when they launched the OnePlus One in 2014. They could have easily gone out of business. And that's one that got big enough to remember them. Wikipedia lists 188 mobile phone manufacturers [1]. A lot of them very local (e.g. EvertekTunisie making phones for Tunisia and Morocco) or defunct; But even my local (German) retailer offers 35 brands. Big ones like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, budget brands like Oppo or ZTE, niche brands like CAT or Beafon. It's a crowded market that doesn't seem particularly hard to enter. And judging by the spotty compatibility of LineageOS they don't all use the same hardware either. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufact...
- oblio 3y agoThankfully people here are asking for good regulation, once which states that at some point in the future every phone ever sold in market X needs to have its core software open sourced, so companies can plan ahead.
- astrange 3y agoThe EU isn't making good regulation, they don't have any tech companies and are just attempting to make it illegal to make anything in a fit of pique. The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore. Europe has an unhealthy culture of naturalistic hippiedom, so this is just the same thing that causes Germany to shut down nuclear power. (If you think this one's good, try combining it with their six other giant laws you haven't heard of some of which conflict with this.)
- stavros 3y agoI've been trying to find words to describe this take but I fail. It's as if someone thought "what's the most jingoistic thing I can say in support of the US and its anti-regulation free-for-all?".
- astrange 3y agoThe US isn't the only country with tech companies. You may have heard of China, Japan, or Korea. And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.
- webmobdev 3y agoThe end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore. Really? Are you claiming that capitalists are so much of a fool that instead of making, say, half the profit they were making before in an unregulated market, they would readily prefer to make 0 profits? The reality is that if American BigTech exit the EU market, then some local or non-American competitor will step in to fill the vacuum. Or have you already forgotten that the European Nokia once dominated the mobile phone industry?
- astrange 3y agoYes, I'm aware of how economic protectionism works. The reason Nokia instantly failed when the US entered the market is because their products were bad and nerdy and they couldn't do good software. eg when they got an iPhone and their reaction was to do low level optimizations of their boring UI to make it 60fps instead of having a nice UI instead.
- rtsil 3y agoThat argument is often used in bad faith/FUD by the big players themselves to halt any regulation attempts. Regulations can be adapted to affect only the companies that reach X percentage in sales or in market share. The EU's Digital Markets Act does precisely this, for instance. The regulators can let smaller players grow and thrive, and regulate them once they've exceeded a certain threshold.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsflover 3y agoThere are already small businesses that do this: Purism and Pine64.
- rendaw 3y agoHow would _this_ regulation raise the cost of entry? At worst they'd just have to release the source code for the firmware they wrote (putting source code on github takes maybe 5m).
- thrashh 3y agoSource code probably involves libraries from other companies and covers patents owned by other people. No one is building a product from complete scratch.
- the8472 3y agoThose suppliers would be subject to the same regulations when supplying to the big players. They should have all that stuff already available once it's in force.