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This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones. Tha

This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones. That would be great, but as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible. Even assuming that building a solid alternative is feasible, though, I don't think their point stands. Generally I'm not keen on legislatively forcing a developer to alter their software, but let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations. I'm all for mandating that they change their code to be less user-hostile, for the same reason I prefer democracy to autocracy. Any party with power enough to impact millions of lives needs to be accountable to those it affects. I don't see the point of distinguishing between government and private corporation when that corporation is on the same scale of power and influence.

abtinf 1y ago
[flagged]
- goopypoop 1y ago
  break into head office to find out
- AshamedCaptain 1y ago
  Is this a good time to introduce the Coca-Cola death squads? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Colombian_death-squad_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Colombian_death-squa...
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic The USA military, and secret services were, and still are, at the behest of "American business interests" See also the Oil industry, and Donald Trump's remarks aimed at the Australian government that might "curtail the tech companies" [1] 1 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebook-twitter-trump-australia-trade-review/105079442 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebo...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- junon 1y ago
  That's a reductio ad absurdum conclusion. Both lobby for and are in major political cahoots with many governmental bodies worldwide. They lobby like crazy, and can defend just about any lawsuit that comes their way - including dodging congressional hearings, selectively adhering to laws other companies cannot afford to skip, etc. But I think you knew that. Being argumentative with the general point OP was making doesn't solve anything and just defends multinationals when they shouldn't be defended.
  - abtinf 1y ago
    Every point you raised is in fact evidence for how they are weaker than governments.
    - junon 1y ago
      It depends on how you quantify it, which isn't really possible and isn't even the point of the comment. It really feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here. The point was that they seem to be impervious to many governments. That would be having, by at least some measure, more power than the government. They weren't meaning they were literal comparisons of amounts of power.
      - abtinf 1y ago
        You’re upset because I won’t help you evade the fact that you are intentionally conflating two distinct concepts: “Power” meaning the infliction violence and physical coercion with the force of law. “Power” meaning the ability to make money by designing products and services people voluntary trade for. This is always an intentional confusion intended to deceive and manipulate. See also https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/economic_power_vs_political_power.html https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/economic_power_vs_politic...
        junon 1y ago
        Yep you're right then. :)
- martin-t 1y ago
  People are weapons. Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people. YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from. Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know. It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.
- busterarm 1y ago
  Why torture someone when you can make every aspect of their lives depend on your moat and then decide to kick them out? Do you know how many people use Google, Apple or Meta for every single sign on for every app/website they use?
- nancyminusone 1y ago
  They have access to such absurdly large amounts of money that they don't need those.
- a2128 1y ago
  No, but Google and Apple together could destroy a nation economically overnight without even lifting a finger, by bricking all devices within that nation and making their services (gmail, google maps, icloud) unavailable. No amount of guns or jails is equivalent to that power
  - martin-t 1y ago
    Or they could "deplatform" anyone they don't like. Sure, you can live without google/meta/reddit/... but you will miss out on both business and social opportunities, especially if they do it without warning. It will disadvantage you in life in ways which are hard to quantify for a single person (you don't know what you don't know) but will be measurable in aggregate.
bsder 1y ago
The primary problem is that we can't build a phone and run it on a cellular carrier network. This is where legislation is needed. Apple and Google are still a problem, but they are a secondary problem.
- dwattttt 1y ago
  You'll run into a variant of the tragedy of the commons; without any kind of regulation or provable assertions from people taking part in common communication infrastructure, it'd be quite easy to ruin it for everyone.
  - bsder 1y ago
    You don't need to allow completely unrestricted access to the network. However, there needs to be a process with a defined cost to certify your hardware. The cost can be expensive and time consuming but it needs to be known and published and the cellular companies need to be held to it. The problem right now is that even if I had a couple of million dollars lying around, I STILL couldn't reliably get a piece of hardware certified for the cellular network. I would have to set up a company, spend untold amounts of money bribing^Wwooing cellular company executives for a couple years, and, maybe, just maybe, I could get my phone through the certification process. The technical aspects of certification are the easy part. The problem is that the cellular companies fully understand that when it happens their power goes to zero because they suddenly become a dumb pipe that everybody just wants to ignore. That's why this will take legislation.
  - fijiaarone 1y ago
    Monopolists always talk about the tragedy of the commons, but don’t see anything wrong with the tragedy of the monopoly and don’t want you to think anything can exist in between.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  You kind of can? The carrier network has no way to verify that your cellular modem is a real modem made by a real modem company, and not 3 SDRs in a trench coat standing on the top of each other. The sheer technical difficulty is what makes this kind of thing impractical. The network does validate that a SIM card is a real SIM card, but you can put a "real SIM card" in anything.
hnuser123456 1y ago
GrapheneOS?
- jetbalsa 1y ago
  Only runs on a handful of hardware, and still uses the binblobs from google for the hardware devices.
  - SlowTao 1y ago
    That is a fair point, this is a similar issue that Libre-boot went through a few years back. Yes, you try to stick clear of binary blobs as much as possible but at a certain point you just run out of hardware that meets that criteria.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Forces users to directly give money to Google and to rely on Google's OS underneath.
- jijijijij 1y ago
  I think GrapheneOS focuses on privacy and security, not liberation. I think their pragmatic and narrow-minded approach is valid, it's important not to conflate their scope with related issues they are unable/unwilling to tackle. Personally, I think a usable pure Linux phone is required to weaken the desktop vs. mobile distinction and break the lock-in. This would additionally empower the desktop platform, confirm it as baseline.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
This is one of the real canaries I watch on "real AI" for programming. It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures. Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult". And would any corporate AI allow that? We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
- ACCount37 1y ago
  AI kicks ass at a lot of "routine reverse engineering" tasks already. You can feed it assembly listings, or bytecode that the decompiler couldn't handle, and get back solid results. And corporate AIs don't really have a fuck to give, at least not yet. You can sic Claude on obvious decompiler outputs, or a repo of questionable sources with a "VERY BIG CORPO - PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL" in every single file, and it'll sift through it - no complaints, no questions asked. And if that data somehow circles back into the training eventually, then all the funnier.
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    That's one of the boil-ups. Why would lack of Linux compatibility for hardware be a thing? If AI can write the drivers in 1/10th the effort/time, it should be a game changer for open source. I haven't heard much from the major projects yet, but I'm not ear-to-the-ground. I guess that is what is disappointing. It's all (to quote n-gage) webshit you see being used for this, and corpo-code so far, to your point.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
wisty 1y ago
Remember, the law provides patent, copyright, trade mark, and NDA protection. While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field. It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest. Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.
- ranyume 1y ago
  >Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation I'm not sure innovation is really impacted when restricting the private sector. Traditionally, innovation happens in public (e.g, universities) or military spaces.
  - throw10920 1y ago
    This is extremely dubious. There are hundreds (thousands?) of examples of innovation happening in the private sector - I could name the blue LED off the top of my head, and got personal computers, search engines, smartphones, cloud computing, and integrated circuits with less than a minute of searching.
- ethersteeds 1y ago
  > It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest. If only it were so. But it's not just that. It's also a question of which section of society has the power to demand or prevent the creation of such a system. Whether enacting labor protections or the Magna Carta, these beneficial restrictions require some leverage. Otherwise what is overall beat and fairest won't be coming up.
jacquesm 1y ago
> Google and Apple have more power than most nations. And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have. The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.
- lukan 1y ago
  "And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation" Since nations can be really small, I don't agree.
  - pharrington 1y ago
    This was my first thought too, but the largest corporations are way too large any healthy society.
  - cyphar 1y ago
    Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. I would hope you'd agree those are not powers that we should grant to large corporations... I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them accountable.
    - yardstick 1y ago
      Kill, not murder. If the country ends your life they are doing it under their authority, not outside their authority.
SilverElfin 1y ago
> Google and Apple have more power than most nations. Yep. They control our information - how we make it, what we are allowed to find, and what we can say. And they are large enough to not face real competition. So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations they are and regulate heavily. Smaller companies can be left unregulated. But not companies worth 500 billion or more.
- the_other 1y ago
  > So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations If they were state owned, we could vote for how the profits get used and we would have larger budgets for healthcare and education.
  - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
    But if they were, they would never have become what they are in the first place, including the good things. States are neither good at innovation nor dynamism. But they are very good at telling you what you should and should not do. The latter part has some wonderful consequences for consumer or worker protections, but it has some terrible ones for creating new stuff or improving the old.
    - inetknght 1y ago
      > But if they were, they would never have become what they are in the first place, including the good things. Does the good outweigh the bad? Perhaps in the beginning. Today? Definitely not.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    The US federal government alone (not including state and other local governments) spends north of $1 trillion dollars per year on healthcare. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... Another $1.3 trillion on wealth transfers from workers to non workers (including disability). And another $608B on wealth transfers from people with higher income to people with lower or no incomes. Alphabet and Apple, combined, earned $193B in 2024, from the entire world. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc... How does your suggestion make any difference, other than destroying 2 of the very few organizations driving demand for US assets, and hence help support the US dollar's purchasing power?
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones." Sometimes owner control, cf. corporate control, can be had by sacrificing hardware functionality, i.e., features, closed source drivers. Choice between particular hardware feature(s) working and control over the hardware in general.
- colordrops 1y ago
  Yes but in the phone space the sacrifice is too much. You often times forgo the ability to even participate in many aspects of society, e.g. banking. It's not your typical "rough around the edges open source alternative", it's just not even a comparison.
  - yardstick 1y ago
    Can’t you do banking on the web via your phone? Same as desktop users?
    - IIsi50MHz 1y ago
      In some places, the bank website directs you to use the app, which then looks for things like whether the device is unlocked or rooted. Banks in these places refuse to trust web browsers.
    - okasaki 1y ago
      I heard some banks don't have web sites, only apps.
      - yardstick 1y ago
        Sounds like they are outliers. None of my banks are like this. Multiple countries and continents.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  Have at least two phones. One with corporate OS for banking, commerce. Another with user-chosen OS for experimentation, able to boot from external media.
makeitdouble 1y ago
> Google and Apple have more power than most nations. To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US. The UK going after Apple, only to get rebutted by the US is the most simple instance of it. International treaties pushed by the US strongly protecting it's top corporations is the more standard behavior. Any entity fighting the duopoly is effectively getting into a fight with the US.
- throwaway31131 1y ago
  > To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US. If this is true then why is Tim Cook visiting Trump? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    The power dynamic between the gifter and the giftee isn't that simple. Even bribes dynamics will change a lot depending on who does it and to which amount. There is a whole antropologic field around that, but to keep it short, if you pay your palace and all expenses with the money funneled to you as gifts, you're not the one in control. Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
    - argomo 1y ago
      CGP Grey's "The Rules for Rulers" (on YouTube) may also be relevant here.
      - myroon5 1y ago
        https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - xandrius 1y ago
narrator 1y ago
Well there's Huawei's Harmony OS. Can someone who knows what's going on with that report in? Is it anything close to an open platform?
- blackoil 1y ago
  It is also equally closed, so not the champion you are looking for. It could still be a major player breaking the duopoly.
GeekyBear 1y ago
The real battle is over Google selling the public on the notion that Android would be the "open" platform that allowed people to run anything they liked on their device, and then deciding to use anticompetitive means to take that freedom away. Without that fraudulent marketing, Android never would have crowded out other options so quickly in the marketplace. The solution is to either have Google back down on breaking its promise that Android would be open or to have an antitrust lawsuit strip Android from Google's control.
- Aachen 1y ago
  What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". But we've accepted Apple's status for so long now, a lot of consumers are stockholmed into thinking giving away control is the only way to have a good phone (evidence: see any thread discussing that maybe Apple should allow other vendors to also use their smartwatch hardware to offer services in non-smartwatch-hardware markets that Apple also offers services in. Half the users seem like they're brainwashed by the marketing material they put out). I don't know that we can convince the general public anymore that 1984 is bad (thinking of Apple's own 1984 ad, specifically) and, without general public, there can theoretically also not be political will I was part of this problem. I've accepted what Apple is doing because I had Android. I didn't think they'd come for me next so I didn't speak up
  - GeekyBear 1y ago
    > What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". Not a legal argument, since Apple never claimed the iPhone was anything else but a walled garden, and walled gardens are legal as long as you are clear that users will be buying into a walled garden from the start. (For example: Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox) Legally, the only thing you could do is change the law to make walled gardens illegal, as they did in the EU. The changes Google has proposed for sideloading are illegal under existing law, since Android was sold to consumers with the promise that it was the "open" platform that allowed users to run anything they like.
    - 1y ago
protocolture 1y ago
> let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations. Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk. Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height. Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.
- nialse 1y ago
  There are power rankings where these top companies are considered more influential than many nations. https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-wo... https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchme... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesl...
  - nialse 1y ago
    Sorry for the terrible formatting. Tried to fix it but the last edit seems to have borked it completely. www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy EDIT: Now in plain text since the last URL does not show up otherwise. And why is it rendering with --, its only - in the URL?
    - protocolture 1y ago
      Influence and power are related but separate concepts. And often the influence of an organisation is related to the state willing to back it. The US intervening for Tesla for instance. And China Petroleum wouldnt be so big if it wasnt for the chinese state.
vbezhenar 1y ago
> ability to run other operating systems on phones > building those alternatives is basically impossible For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook. Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources. I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.
- yardstick 1y ago
  I’m fairly sure the modem firmware on the Pixels was never open. There’s some hardware that will never have open firmware to it. Especially when that firmware deals with regulated airwaves like cell signals.
  - vbezhenar 1y ago
    My laptop has plenty of chips with closed firmware. They matter not. Open hardware is a noble goal, but open software is enough. Firmware is part of hardware block, so having open operating system, which sends blobs into some devices for initialisation is perfectly acceptable compromise.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  >I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders. My guess would be that it's a continuously moving target. There's no point in spending years working to support some weird integrated wifi adapter+battery controller when by the time you're done the hardware is already obsolete and no longer being manufactured. Repeat that for every device on the phone. The only ones who can keep up with that pace are the manufacturers themselves. It'd be different if there was some kind of standardization that would make the effort worthwhile, though.
  - 1y ago
fsflover 1y ago
> as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible I don't understand why everybody is ignoring existing, working GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone. The former is my daily driver btw.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Apparently they just can't live without Netflix and its even worth their freedom.

abtinf 1y ago

[flagged]

goopypoop 1y ago
break into head office to find out
AshamedCaptain 1y ago
Is this a good time to introduce the Coca-Cola death squads? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Colombian_death-squad_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Colombian_death-squa...
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic The USA military, and secret services were, and still are, at the behest of "American business interests" See also the Oil industry, and Donald Trump's remarks aimed at the Australian government that might "curtail the tech companies" [1] 1 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebook-twitter-trump-australia-trade-review/105079442 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebo...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
junon 1y ago
That's a reductio ad absurdum conclusion. Both lobby for and are in major political cahoots with many governmental bodies worldwide. They lobby like crazy, and can defend just about any lawsuit that comes their way - including dodging congressional hearings, selectively adhering to laws other companies cannot afford to skip, etc. But I think you knew that. Being argumentative with the general point OP was making doesn't solve anything and just defends multinationals when they shouldn't be defended.
- abtinf 1y ago
  Every point you raised is in fact evidence for how they are weaker than governments.
  - junon 1y ago
    It depends on how you quantify it, which isn't really possible and isn't even the point of the comment. It really feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here. The point was that they seem to be impervious to many governments. That would be having, by at least some measure, more power than the government. They weren't meaning they were literal comparisons of amounts of power.
    - abtinf 1y ago
      You’re upset because I won’t help you evade the fact that you are intentionally conflating two distinct concepts: “Power” meaning the infliction violence and physical coercion with the force of law. “Power” meaning the ability to make money by designing products and services people voluntary trade for. This is always an intentional confusion intended to deceive and manipulate. See also https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/economic_power_vs_political_power.html https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/economic_power_vs_politic...
      - junon 1y ago
        Yep you're right then. :)
martin-t 1y ago
People are weapons. Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people. YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from. Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know. It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.
busterarm 1y ago
Why torture someone when you can make every aspect of their lives depend on your moat and then decide to kick them out? Do you know how many people use Google, Apple or Meta for every single sign on for every app/website they use?
nancyminusone 1y ago
They have access to such absurdly large amounts of money that they don't need those.
a2128 1y ago
No, but Google and Apple together could destroy a nation economically overnight without even lifting a finger, by bricking all devices within that nation and making their services (gmail, google maps, icloud) unavailable. No amount of guns or jails is equivalent to that power
- martin-t 1y ago
  Or they could "deplatform" anyone they don't like. Sure, you can live without google/meta/reddit/... but you will miss out on both business and social opportunities, especially if they do it without warning. It will disadvantage you in life in ways which are hard to quantify for a single person (you don't know what you don't know) but will be measurable in aggregate.

bsder 1y ago

The primary problem is that we can't build a phone and run it on a cellular carrier network. This is where legislation is needed. Apple and Google are still a problem, but they are a secondary problem.

dwattttt 1y ago
You'll run into a variant of the tragedy of the commons; without any kind of regulation or provable assertions from people taking part in common communication infrastructure, it'd be quite easy to ruin it for everyone.
- bsder 1y ago
  You don't need to allow completely unrestricted access to the network. However, there needs to be a process with a defined cost to certify your hardware. The cost can be expensive and time consuming but it needs to be known and published and the cellular companies need to be held to it. The problem right now is that even if I had a couple of million dollars lying around, I STILL couldn't reliably get a piece of hardware certified for the cellular network. I would have to set up a company, spend untold amounts of money bribing^Wwooing cellular company executives for a couple years, and, maybe, just maybe, I could get my phone through the certification process. The technical aspects of certification are the easy part. The problem is that the cellular companies fully understand that when it happens their power goes to zero because they suddenly become a dumb pipe that everybody just wants to ignore. That's why this will take legislation.
- fijiaarone 1y ago
  Monopolists always talk about the tragedy of the commons, but don’t see anything wrong with the tragedy of the monopoly and don’t want you to think anything can exist in between.
ACCount37 1y ago
You kind of can? The carrier network has no way to verify that your cellular modem is a real modem made by a real modem company, and not 3 SDRs in a trench coat standing on the top of each other. The sheer technical difficulty is what makes this kind of thing impractical. The network does validate that a SIM card is a real SIM card, but you can put a "real SIM card" in anything.

hnuser123456 1y ago

GrapheneOS?

jetbalsa 1y ago
Only runs on a handful of hardware, and still uses the binblobs from google for the hardware devices.
- SlowTao 1y ago
  That is a fair point, this is a similar issue that Libre-boot went through a few years back. Yes, you try to stick clear of binary blobs as much as possible but at a certain point you just run out of hardware that meets that criteria.
fsflover 1y ago
Forces users to directly give money to Google and to rely on Google's OS underneath.
jijijijij 1y ago
I think GrapheneOS focuses on privacy and security, not liberation. I think their pragmatic and narrow-minded approach is valid, it's important not to conflate their scope with related issues they are unable/unwilling to tackle. Personally, I think a usable pure Linux phone is required to weaken the desktop vs. mobile distinction and break the lock-in. This would additionally empower the desktop platform, confirm it as baseline.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

This is one of the real canaries I watch on "real AI" for programming. It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures. Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult". And would any corporate AI allow that? We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.

sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]
ACCount37 1y ago
AI kicks ass at a lot of "routine reverse engineering" tasks already. You can feed it assembly listings, or bytecode that the decompiler couldn't handle, and get back solid results. And corporate AIs don't really have a fuck to give, at least not yet. You can sic Claude on obvious decompiler outputs, or a repo of questionable sources with a "VERY BIG CORPO - PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL" in every single file, and it'll sift through it - no complaints, no questions asked. And if that data somehow circles back into the training eventually, then all the funnier.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  That's one of the boil-ups. Why would lack of Linux compatibility for hardware be a thing? If AI can write the drivers in 1/10th the effort/time, it should be a game changer for open source. I haven't heard much from the major projects yet, but I'm not ear-to-the-ground. I guess that is what is disappointing. It's all (to quote n-gage) webshit you see being used for this, and corpo-code so far, to your point.
  - ACCount37 1y ago

wisty 1y ago

Remember, the law provides patent, copyright, trade mark, and NDA protection. While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field. It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest. Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.

ranyume 1y ago
>Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation I'm not sure innovation is really impacted when restricting the private sector. Traditionally, innovation happens in public (e.g, universities) or military spaces.
- throw10920 1y ago
  This is extremely dubious. There are hundreds (thousands?) of examples of innovation happening in the private sector - I could name the blue LED off the top of my head, and got personal computers, search engines, smartphones, cloud computing, and integrated circuits with less than a minute of searching.
ethersteeds 1y ago
> It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest. If only it were so. But it's not just that. It's also a question of which section of society has the power to demand or prevent the creation of such a system. Whether enacting labor protections or the Magna Carta, these beneficial restrictions require some leverage. Otherwise what is overall beat and fairest won't be coming up.

jacquesm 1y ago

> Google and Apple have more power than most nations. And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have. The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.

lukan 1y ago
"And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation" Since nations can be really small, I don't agree.
- pharrington 1y ago
  This was my first thought too, but the largest corporations are way too large any healthy society.
- cyphar 1y ago
  Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. I would hope you'd agree those are not powers that we should grant to large corporations... I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them accountable.
  - yardstick 1y ago
    Kill, not murder. If the country ends your life they are doing it under their authority, not outside their authority.

SilverElfin 1y ago

> Google and Apple have more power than most nations. Yep. They control our information - how we make it, what we are allowed to find, and what we can say. And they are large enough to not face real competition. So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations they are and regulate heavily. Smaller companies can be left unregulated. But not companies worth 500 billion or more.

the_other 1y ago
> So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations If they were state owned, we could vote for how the profits get used and we would have larger budgets for healthcare and education.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  But if they were, they would never have become what they are in the first place, including the good things. States are neither good at innovation nor dynamism. But they are very good at telling you what you should and should not do. The latter part has some wonderful consequences for consumer or worker protections, but it has some terrible ones for creating new stuff or improving the old.
  - inetknght 1y ago
    > But if they were, they would never have become what they are in the first place, including the good things. Does the good outweigh the bad? Perhaps in the beginning. Today? Definitely not.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  The US federal government alone (not including state and other local governments) spends north of $1 trillion dollars per year on healthcare. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... Another $1.3 trillion on wealth transfers from workers to non workers (including disability). And another $608B on wealth transfers from people with higher income to people with lower or no incomes. Alphabet and Apple, combined, earned $193B in 2024, from the entire world. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc... How does your suggestion make any difference, other than destroying 2 of the very few organizations driving demand for US assets, and hence help support the US dollar's purchasing power?

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"This makes the point that the real battle we should be fighting is not for control of Android/iOS, but the ability to run other operating systems on phones." Sometimes owner control, cf. corporate control, can be had by sacrificing hardware functionality, i.e., features, closed source drivers. Choice between particular hardware feature(s) working and control over the hardware in general.

colordrops 1y ago
Yes but in the phone space the sacrifice is too much. You often times forgo the ability to even participate in many aspects of society, e.g. banking. It's not your typical "rough around the edges open source alternative", it's just not even a comparison.
- yardstick 1y ago
  Can’t you do banking on the web via your phone? Same as desktop users?
  - IIsi50MHz 1y ago
    In some places, the bank website directs you to use the app, which then looks for things like whether the device is unlocked or rooted. Banks in these places refuse to trust web browsers.
  - okasaki 1y ago
    I heard some banks don't have web sites, only apps.
    - yardstick 1y ago
      Sounds like they are outliers. None of my banks are like this. Multiple countries and continents.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Have at least two phones. One with corporate OS for banking, commerce. Another with user-chosen OS for experimentation, able to boot from external media.

makeitdouble 1y ago

> Google and Apple have more power than most nations. To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US. The UK going after Apple, only to get rebutted by the US is the most simple instance of it. International treaties pushed by the US strongly protecting it's top corporations is the more standard behavior. Any entity fighting the duopoly is effectively getting into a fight with the US.

throwaway31131 1y ago
> To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US. If this is true then why is Tim Cook visiting Trump? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  The power dynamic between the gifter and the giftee isn't that simple. Even bribes dynamics will change a lot depending on who does it and to which amount. There is a whole antropologic field around that, but to keep it short, if you pay your palace and all expenses with the money funneled to you as gifts, you're not the one in control. Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
  - argomo 1y ago
    CGP Grey's "The Rules for Rulers" (on YouTube) may also be relevant here.
    - myroon5 1y ago
      https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- xandrius 1y ago

narrator 1y ago

Well there's Huawei's Harmony OS. Can someone who knows what's going on with that report in? Is it anything close to an open platform?

blackoil 1y ago
It is also equally closed, so not the champion you are looking for. It could still be a major player breaking the duopoly.

GeekyBear 1y ago

The real battle is over Google selling the public on the notion that Android would be the "open" platform that allowed people to run anything they liked on their device, and then deciding to use anticompetitive means to take that freedom away. Without that fraudulent marketing, Android never would have crowded out other options so quickly in the marketplace. The solution is to either have Google back down on breaking its promise that Android would be open or to have an antitrust lawsuit strip Android from Google's control.

Aachen 1y ago
What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". But we've accepted Apple's status for so long now, a lot of consumers are stockholmed into thinking giving away control is the only way to have a good phone (evidence: see any thread discussing that maybe Apple should allow other vendors to also use their smartwatch hardware to offer services in non-smartwatch-hardware markets that Apple also offers services in. Half the users seem like they're brainwashed by the marketing material they put out). I don't know that we can convince the general public anymore that 1984 is bad (thinking of Apple's own 1984 ad, specifically) and, without general public, there can theoretically also not be political will I was part of this problem. I've accepted what Apple is doing because I had Android. I didn't think they'd come for me next so I didn't speak up
- GeekyBear 1y ago
  > What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". Not a legal argument, since Apple never claimed the iPhone was anything else but a walled garden, and walled gardens are legal as long as you are clear that users will be buying into a walled garden from the start. (For example: Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox) Legally, the only thing you could do is change the law to make walled gardens illegal, as they did in the EU. The changes Google has proposed for sideloading are illegal under existing law, since Android was sold to consumers with the promise that it was the "open" platform that allowed users to run anything they like.
  - 1y ago

protocolture 1y ago

> let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations. Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk. Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height. Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.

nialse 1y ago
There are power rankings where these top companies are considered more influential than many nations. https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-wo... https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchme... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesl...
- nialse 1y ago
  Sorry for the terrible formatting. Tried to fix it but the last edit seems to have borked it completely. www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy EDIT: Now in plain text since the last URL does not show up otherwise. And why is it rendering with --, its only - in the URL?
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Influence and power are related but separate concepts. And often the influence of an organisation is related to the state willing to back it. The US intervening for Tesla for instance. And China Petroleum wouldnt be so big if it wasnt for the chinese state.

vbezhenar 1y ago

> ability to run other operating systems on phones > building those alternatives is basically impossible For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook. Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources. I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

yardstick 1y ago
I’m fairly sure the modem firmware on the Pixels was never open. There’s some hardware that will never have open firmware to it. Especially when that firmware deals with regulated airwaves like cell signals.
- vbezhenar 1y ago
  My laptop has plenty of chips with closed firmware. They matter not. Open hardware is a noble goal, but open software is enough. Firmware is part of hardware block, so having open operating system, which sends blobs into some devices for initialisation is perfectly acceptable compromise.
fluoridation 1y ago
>I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders. My guess would be that it's a continuously moving target. There's no point in spending years working to support some weird integrated wifi adapter+battery controller when by the time you're done the hardware is already obsolete and no longer being manufactured. Repeat that for every device on the phone. The only ones who can keep up with that pace are the manufacturers themselves. It'd be different if there was some kind of standardization that would make the effort worthwhile, though.
- 1y ago

fsflover 1y ago

> as the author acknowledges, building those alternatives is basically impossible I don't understand why everybody is ignoring existing, working GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone. The former is my daily driver btw.

msgodel 1y ago
Apparently they just can't live without Netflix and its even worth their freedom.