"Choice. I'm not forced into a service provided by anyone."
This us mental gymnastics.
Oh, customer's chose a network operator that sells their data. Nevermind that all 4 network operators sell your data! Or could have chosen to live without a phone and be like a hermit in the woods!
> And yet you can literally pick up a phone, dial some numbers, and reach everyone else who has a phone number.
And yet you can literally pick up a [product engineered to a phone company’s specifications], dial some numbers [assigned by a phone company] and reach everyone else who [also agreed to the phone company’s TOS] [as long as you and them have paid a large monthly fee].
This isn’t freedom. Companies still decide how you can use their services.
> We are not free to provide services to other devices on our own devices.
Of course you are. I'm speaking from an American perspective, but this is the very foundation of liberty.
> The network does not provide the required environment to make this possible. Why? It's not the hardware.
I do not own the network that my phone operates on, and the people that do have decided to control what they allow on it. I can start my own network and attempt to compete.
> That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.
I get your point but making calls is no longer the principal reason to own a smartphone. I have made no calls in the last two months and have received just one. But I have spent hours on Skype via WiFi, recorded tens of hours of video and taken hundreds of photographs, as well as read lots of books, sent and received money for goods that I have used the phone to list for sale online. Not to mention email and dozens of other applications.
Almost none of my use needed the cellular network.
> The nice thing about the free market is that there are alternatives to choose from.
That's the nice thing about a free market with perfect trust busting. You are trying to make me choose a large tech to like just so I can buy a phone with everything they choose for me to maximize their benefit.
> This is a real stretch.
The US made this stretch over and over, i.e. on IP phones that didn't want to support 911. In a way they are right, any reductions in quality or expectations in availability would quickly go from a niche problem to few people still having a landline with 911 service. Having no phone is fine because you don't expect to have it be your way to call 911, iphone owners often think they planned correctly but can't make any calls once their battery dies.
> I don't think you really have a "right" or entitlement to just access everyone. You're not entitled to use someone else's business, even if it's a good one.
And yet you can literally pick up a phone, dial some numbers, and reach everyone else who has a phone number.
> preventing us from doing things with phones that we purchased.
Nobody is preventing you. Who is preventing you? There’s no government action here. You buy the phone or you buy a librephone. Let’s leave the government out altogether.
You’re the one pushing for some kind of regulation against free agents interacting. No need to contact the federals on this.
>Furthermore, this just puts mobile phones on par with landlines. It used to be that having a phone meant having a landline at home, and obviously that meant knowing exactly who a number belonged to.
Not really. Unless you lived alone, a landline was often shared with everyone in the household. Furthermore, just because there is a link (by necessity of delivering a service to a physical location), doesn't mean there needs to be a link.
Then there is a free phone. You don't pay a lower price if you refuse the phone, so it's effectively free.
There are contract terms (usually 2 years), but if you cancel, you pay the remaining value of the phone, so you still got some percentage of that phone subsidized by the carrier.
> As sombody who always buys unlocked phones I have no expectations from my carrier to support or replace them.
As someone who buys unlocked phones, I wouldn’t use a carrier who didn’t support them. They’re a bad abusive carrier not worth your money if they do not.
I don’t understand why anyone would be more ok with their cell provider dictating what device you can use than they would be with their internet provider dictating what computer they can use.
> It is optional. No amount of whining will change that.
Would you be still saying this if your power, water, phone, and internet lines were permanently cut off because some random person hacked your account(s) for them?
Those are private companies, and there are certainly people who manage to live in the woods without any of the utilities mentioned, so they are technically "optional" as well. We have schooled ourselves to think of social networks as optional, but in 2022 I'd argue that they are just as non-optional as the telephone; and perhaps even more so in certain ways. (e.g. What was the last time your local government called you over the telephone? But they are probably replying to Facebook comments.)
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