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Any sane company with the goal of making money from operating a service would just meter water from a device they own and charge a reasonable fee. Most of the p

Any sane company with the goal of making money from operating a service would just meter water from a device they own and charge a reasonable fee. Most of the people complaining would be completely fine with Apple charging a reasonable fee for Android access to iMessage. A system like yours would only make sense if your goals had nothing to do with covering the costs of operating the service, and were instead growing and maintaining your licensed faucet marketshare. Some people might think that isn't in the public's benefit and want to change the law. In the case of water services we already have, and the licensed faucet scheme would likely be illegal basically everywhere in the US.

sokoloff 3y ago
At my last house, we had a private well and, later, a private company laid water pipes in the street and offered for us to connect to them via their own meter. I don't think anything was illegal about that company offering for me to rent a meter from them for the ~$10/mo connection [aka "meter rental"] fee, and use whatever mix of water that I wanted from their metered source or my own well, provided I had a backflow preventer to prevent any of my well water from entering their metered water lines. If someone chooses not to rent an Orange water meter, they can't have Orange water. That seems like a choice that Orange can make. Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.
- enragedcacti 3y ago
  > Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different. Their choice of what water meter to use is completely transparent to you provided it works properly. It has no effect on how you use the service or any other aspect of your life. This is obviously not true of phones. The bundling of separate product categories is what makes the situation different, the same way that bundling water service with the arbitrary requirement of a "licensed faucet" would likely be illegal many places.

sokoloff 3y ago

At my last house, we had a private well and, later, a private company laid water pipes in the street and offered for us to connect to them via their own meter. I don't think anything was illegal about that company offering for me to rent a meter from them for the ~$10/mo connection [aka "meter rental"] fee, and use whatever mix of water that I wanted from their metered source or my own well, provided I had a backflow preventer to prevent any of my well water from entering their metered water lines. If someone chooses not to rent an Orange water meter, they can't have Orange water. That seems like a choice that Orange can make. Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.

enragedcacti 3y ago
> Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different. Their choice of what water meter to use is completely transparent to you provided it works properly. It has no effect on how you use the service or any other aspect of your life. This is obviously not true of phones. The bundling of separate product categories is what makes the situation different, the same way that bundling water service with the arbitrary requirement of a "licensed faucet" would likely be illegal many places.