We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.
You have no way of knowing and also how much content is legal or not
My plex library has my entire library that I’ve been curating since iTunes was released which is now predominantly FLAC files I buy from Bleep and Bandcamp
Every movie I have ever bought is there too. I suppose technically it’s all illegal right? I copied it. In some cases I even bypassed some things the DMCA outlawed to do so.
And so what?
It’s such a quaint sentiment in 2026 to care about illegal content when the entirety of the LLM industry did this, but far worse, at scale, and nobody has even charged Meta or anyone else with infringement.
> It’s such a quaint sentiment in 2026 to care about illegal content when the entirety of the LLM industry did this, but far worse, at scale, and nobody has even charged Meta or anyone else with infringement.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I try to obtain my content legitimately because all I can control in this world is whether I act right, not whether other people do.
If the last decade of Siri has taught us anything, they can literally ship the worst version of a thing and people will still buy an iphone. They’re just that good.
It really was a fun time. I remember sitting in a coffee shop just sniffing WiFi traffic.
A friend was a reporter for the local paper and interviewed the mayor. I turned my laptop around and showed my friend the mayors imap password. Just right there floating through the air.
I had to do the same at a friend's house once because he forgot his email password that was still saved in the browser!
And what about "borrowing" internet access by using a WiFi connection that used WEP? Learning the process and getting the first password was so satisfying...
In the early 2000s a lot of people rolled with no encryption at all! In high school I'd drive around the nearby neighborhoods at lunch until I found an open wifi network so I could browse the net. Never took long to find one.
If vendors didn’t make it a default setting that would still be the case today
I remember when SunOS shipped enterprise servers with pretty much every service enabled. And the patching process was so cumbersome and risky many admins never bothered applying the recommended patch clusters
Funny, my Rivian assistant is more useful for this use case than Siri
I did some side by side navigation queries and was surprised how much more I preferred the responses from a company that isn’t even really trying to be a major AI player
Toys making noise when nobody is around to play with them is a pretty common “ghost” encounter. We had one ourselves with a Sesame Street Ernie doll that would randomly say “I feel great” in an empty room , in the middle of the night, etc. caught it on video once triggering with the doll just lying on the floor.
Turns out when battery voltage gets low (but not yet dead) this can happen in a circuit. I swapped out the batteries and our ghost never came back. Not surprised to hear it happening in a store where stock just sits there for a long time.
Pretty creepy though to hear that when you are lying in bed
I was in the house a couple of weeks ago when I kept hearing a voice coming from upstairs every so often I couldn't track down because it never happened when I was up there.
Which is to say, nowadays we have some toys that spontaneously speak in the middle of the day with no input too, by design. It didn't "freak me out" or anything, it was clearly an electronic sound from a speaker. Did make me ponder the idea of leaving some sort of speaker with a software-defined-radio wired into the mains so I could do a drive by of my old house a few years later and start transmitting things into it around Halloween or something, though.
One wonders, how the engagement economy will transfer the talking toy industry. A/B testing has confirmed that screaming "Fire!" or yelling "Everybody on the floor, this is a robbery!" - creates instantanious engagement and is thus superior to classic toys engagement.
The best part is those older toys with low batteries would have an extra creep to the voice because of the low voltage. We had one that sounded absolutely possessed by a devil. It was truly terrifying to hear that in the middle of the night :-D
It is not uncommon to for some guitarists to use partially depleted batteries to power certain effect pedals, especially fuzz pedals. People can get particular about tracking down specific brands of carbon-zinc type batteries that are perceived to have preferred discharge characteristics. And there are “battery sag simulator” pedals.
At least that's the story I've read online a few times about the bass sound on Sir Psycho Sexy having to do with the dying battery on the pedal.
And, of course, just a little bit before DSP and simulators become available (or feasible for mainstream availability), those of us who were playing as teenagers in the 90s often got weird sounds on account of trying to juice the last bit of the batteries in our pedals. I love it that some among the current generation of kids like to simulate tape hiss, dying batteries, and other things we'd suffer then :)
This effect still happens with cheap battery-powered cat toys that chirp. Some are rechargeable... others are not, and keep squawking pixelated noises of various pitches for years on end. Ask me how I know.
One of my son's old toys is up in some box in the attic. Whenever I go up there, about one in three times it says, "The lions says 'Roar'", when I'm walking back down the attic stairs. I don't know why that is what trips it, as walking up them doesn't seem to, and I don't know what box it is in and can't be bothered to look for it the pull the batteries out. It's been doing that for years, as he's in college now.
I remember waking up as a kid to the sound of "Me scared!" because our Furby had fallen off the bed as I drifted to sleep. It's one of the audio clips the Furby plays when it is placed upside down.
Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work
There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades
On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.
Can you install any other OS on any iPhone at all? As far as I am aware the best Android phone for installing non stock OSes on is the Google Pixel itself, Googles own 1st party phone.
I have seen Android booted on an iPhone. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think anybody continued working on it because... why do it when you could already buy an Android device?
Also, I'm curious... can you really install an OS besides Android on a Pixel, etc? AFAIK it's just different distros of Android, it's not like you could install BSD or something, right?
I figured Linux would be available, since Android is a Linux distro itself (of sorts, at least). But no other OS's like BSD, Unix, or Windows is available. Am I to understand correctly that only the Pixel 3a is able to run Linux distros, or was that meant as an example?
It's absolutely how they work. If there's only a single grocery store in town (and for whatever reason others can't be opened), is that somehow not a monopoly even though there are several pharmacies and hardware stores?
That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.
Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.
They don't have a monopoly on phones. They do have (something like) a monopoly on app distribution on the iOS platform.
Maybe monopoly is not the right legal category, and maybe what they are doing is perfectly legal and always will be, but I don't think the fundamental point can be argued away with analogies like these.
Why would I use the global market share to determine if someone has a monopoly, though? It seems like a flawed way to determine how much choice consumers have.
For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.
How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't? I can see the duopoly argument, but no idea how apple could be a monopoly by itself
Being a monopoly isn't illegal. So many discussions gloss over this fact, and people get at each other's throat over hypothetical abuses and ad-hominem scenarios.
Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.
In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.
You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.
In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.
I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
> I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.
Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.
In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.
That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.
> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option
But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?
I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.
> I still don’t understand why they should be required to.
It harms the market. There are good indie devs and companies being unfairly punished for trying to ship good software on iOS. Apple's double-standards are the #1, red-alert issue.
The secondary issue, and one that upset me, is that it encourages Apple to make worse products. If Apple has an adjustable taxation knob that users have no control over, they can extort developers in exchange for making the platform worse. Apple knows that alternative App Stores and billing methods will destroy this status quo, which is why they invest millions lobbying against Europe's common-sense DSA/DMA laws. If the United States adopted a similar regulation, then Apple's financials would crater, jeopardizing their company's future simply by making iOS behave like a normal Mac or PC.
Apple should not be gambling their future on an exploitative status-quo, they should be reinvesting in capabilities, security and making products that people want to buy. Just like Google and their AdSense monopoly, I think Apple's terrible choices are informed by a captive revenue stream that they abuse to boost their quarterly reports.
> How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't?
One allows you to install different browsers, the other does not.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal (in the US). It's what they do that matters.
Now, that doesn't mean Apple is a monopoly with iOS, because the Sherman act doens't dictate it only looks at US only markets. It look at what makes sense in the context. Of course, a court could decide that regardless of what the numbers are internationall, what matters in this case is just the US market.
Trying to predict that is useless at the moment though because the US courts are all over the place.
I'm not defending anybody. I'm just saying, if I live in a market where one company has 99% of the market, somebody coming in and saying "There's not a monopoly. They only have 30% of the global market! " isn't going to make me feel any better, because I don't live everywhere in the world. I live where I live, and that company has 99% of the market there.
I just don't think the 30% of the global market number is relevant to anything in terms of arguing if somebody has a monopoly. Are there even any countries who use a definition of "monopoly" that uses global marketshare to determine if there's a monopoly? Surely those definitions all look at marketshare within some specific region?
There are entire countries where one company has 93%+ marketshare. Yes, maybe people can go to another country where the marketshare is different, but do we all seriously think that the global marketshare not resembling a monopoly definitely means that there's no one market where a monopoly exists?
I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.
Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.
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