The Digital Markets Act definitely is one of the better EU laws. I value it at a similar regard as the GDPR, and hope the EC will not bow before Apple’s anti-competitive lobbyism and a potentially looming trade war. The FSF Europe is playing a crucial part in this, thank you!
I do hope for a future where everyone will be able to use their own devices to the extent and capabilities they see fit. In that regard, I also hope the EC will rule the Core Technology Fee to be in violation of the DMA. Apple is making enough profit off their devices as-is, there is zero reason for them to collect additional fees on software distributed outside their own infrastructure.
Many people are asking “Why force Apple to open up their platforms? Why don’t the users just pick another platform to run their software on?”. If you are genuinely interested in the long answer, I strongly recommend “Chokepoint Capitalism” and “The Internet Con” by Cory Doctorow
This guy. I can’t tell his NY Times bestselling fiction apart from his NY Times bestselling nonfiction. At least his YA novels are clearly distinguishable by the cover graphic design. Anyway, I really don’t understand why he (or somebody!) can’t put up a free, concise summary of his argument(s?) if they’re so important. It always seems to boil down to more government regulation, as though regulatory capture hasn’t already paved so many miles of the road we’re on.
Thanks for the links. As for a summary, I think he regularly writes blogposts and columns and appears on podcasts and gives talks. Here is a random interview I found where the first two questions are about interoperability and regulatory capture.
Sounds bogus to me. There’s a gazillion hardware platforms. Pick an android device. Pick any of a thousand laptop brands.
There’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software. Doesn’t matter if there are other options. I’m not sure if it’s hubris or greed from Apple, but it doesn’t serve the public, and that practice deserves to get shut down.
It also sets a dangerous precedent, which other companies may follow. Given enough of such locked down vendors, overall software freedom would erode enough to become a real problem. So even if now there’s the excuse that there are plenty of “more open” alternatives, it’s still fundamentally unacceptable IMO.
Besides, it’s not like there’s a huge amount of choice on mobile…
I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them. I’m not a libertarian; but modern democratic thought, from the Declaration of Independence through the UN Charter on Human Rights, starts with people’s rights.
If I want to sell you a machine with a black box inside it that’s welded shut, that’s my right. You are welcome to try to hacksaw your black box, of course, or to buy a competing device that’s not locked.
You are welcome to try to hacksaw your black box, of course
In most of the world, that’s not true. In fact most of the world forbids you from even trying to look inside the black box other than for specific purposes. The law is already heavily imbalanced in favor of the black box manufacturers.
See 17 USC §1201, or 2001/29/EC Art. 6 for those I’m aware of.
The reality is capitalism doesn’t work this way. Modern history suggests that pretty much the first thing capital does when operating in truly unfettered markets is to try to form monopolies, or at the very least cartels. The US discovered this the hard way which is how they ended up passing the quintessential modern “anti-trust” legislation - which of course the neoliberals have spent the last 40-odd years trying to dilute.
I don’t believe in “truly unfettered markets”, and they don’t exist anywhere; that’s a straw man. Nor is there a monopoly/cartel here: Apple has strong competitors in Google, Samsung, Microsoft, etc., none of whom have control over the phone or OS market. Apple doesn’t even have 50% market share. Things are a lot better than in the mid-90s when Microsoft was in a monopolistic position.
If I want to sell you a machine with a black box inside it that’s welded shut, that’s my right. You are welcome to try to hacksaw your black box, of course, or to buy a competing device that’s not locked.
I agree, and so does the DMA. That’s why it only kicks in for companies that have achieved a certain level of market dominance that allows them sell things that are not what the customers want, but which the customers must buy because of other features. The Android / iOS duopoly is so entrenched that Microsoft was not able to successfully enter the market with a competing product. If you look at the main iOS or Android stores, there are so many apps that there’s a huge lock-in effect. Even switching from iOS to Android or vice versa is often hard because there’s often at least one app that doesn’t have a direct equivalent (and a lot more that require you to buy them again for the other platform).
Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
Tautology detected.
I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them. I’m not a libertarian; but modern democratic thought, from the Declaration of Independence through the UN Charter on Human Rights, starts with people’s rights.
You have to be very selective in your reading to think that the concept of “people’s rights” applies to huge economic structures with the power to shape society.
Right, which is essentially a form of repetition. Not necessarily word for word, but that wasn’t what I meant.
Tautologies add nothing to the discussion because they restate what was already part of the discussion, implied or explicit.
It’s like saying “all triangles have 3 sides”; well, yeah, “triangle” already means “3-sided”, so the sentence is equivalent to saying, “all 3-sided [objects] have 3 sides”.
I’m really not seeing how that’s the case in the original comment under discussion:
Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
If you wanted to tweak it to be tautological, it’d be something like:
Things should be allowed unless they shouldn’t be allowed.
“There are good reasons to forbid them” is not equivalent to “they should be forbidden”, because when looking at whether we “should” do something, we don’t only look at whether there are good reasons to do so, we also consider if there are any good reasons not to do so and make a decision by weighing up the pros and cons.
When you consider his point charitably, it’s clear he’s saying, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something and there are no good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it”.
Ironically, his statement may have been more obviously not tautological if he’d restated it by contrasting it with its opposite, like so: “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them [rather than being forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them]” — thus making it obvious that his point was, as I said, “things should be allowed by default”.
Right, which is essentially a form of repetition. Not necessarily word for word, but that wasn’t what I meant.
so repetition, but not necessarily “in the original phrasing.”
When you consider his point charitably, it’s clear he’s saying, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something and there are no good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it”.
but then the statement itself is a good reason to allow the thing, so the antecedent can never be true and the statement is vacuous.
but then the statement itself is a good reason to allow the thing, so the antecedent can never be true and the statement is vacuous.
At this point, I think you’re being way too literal, which is not how human language works.
Yes, if you want to rephrase his point as, “there being no good reasons to forbid something is itself a good reason to allow it”, which is again, just another way of saying, “things should be allowed by default”, then feel free to do that.
You clearly understand his point.
But let me play the literal game with you for a bit. The statement, “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” can be interpreted, even literally as, “things [in general] should be allowed unless there are good reasons to ban them [in particular]”.
In other words, equivocate on “things” (which we refer to as “them” in the second usage).
Sure, for any given class of things you try to evaluate this rule on, it’ll reduce to, “X’s should be allowed unless there are good reasons to ban X’s”, but as my dictionary claims in its sample sentence for “tautology” anyway, “all logical propositions are reducible to either tautologies or contradictions”.
I explain with some code analogies below, but I want to correct my previous statement that his rule is equivalent to:
if there are no good reasons to forbid something and there are no good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it
In reality, it’s more like:
if there are no good reasons to forbid something, even without any good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it
I also noticed you didn’t explicitly address this part of my previous comment:
I’m really not seeing how that’s the case in the original comment under discussion:
Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
If you wanted to tweak it to be tautological, it’d be something like:
Things should be allowed unless they shouldn’t be allowed.
“There are good reasons to forbid them” is not equivalent to “they should be forbidden”, because when looking at whether we “should” do something, we don’t only look at whether there are good reasons to do so, we also consider if there are any good reasons not to do so and make a decision by weighing up the pros and cons.
Can you explain how “there are good reasons to forbid them” is equivalent to “they should be forbidden”, given that we also have to consider whether the reasons to allow them outweigh the reasons to forbid them before we can say they should be forbidden?
I understand it to be a truism. I don’t know what “by default” could mean in this context.
Let me try to explain it another way then. Imagine you’re writing a command for a CLI. Something like:
x abc --def .
You have a configurable behaviour that’s set by a config file in /etc, or a config file in ~ if that’s not there, or an environment variable $GHI if that’s not there, or a command line argument --ghi <value> if that’s not there.
You can describe this as “if there’s no configured value in a good location, then default to X”. What you’re doing is the equivalent of saying, “but there is a configured value, the developers have configured the default” (defaulting to X — instead of erroring from a missing value, for example — is itself a configuration).
I mean, sure, you can say that, but it’s only a tautology if you force it to be one, since there’s a perfectly reasonable way of interpreting it a non-tautological way, which is by interpreting “a configured value” to simply not include the configuration given by the developers, even though literally speaking, it’s also configuration.
You could probably analogise other base cases in a recursive function. The statement “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” can be codified as the following recursive algorithm,
which is also an algorithmification of what I was getting at with my restatement of, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something, even without any good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it”:
allow
:: [ReasonToAllow Subject]
-> [ReasonToForbid Subject]
-> Subject
-> Bool
allow _ [] x = True -- X should be allowed…
allow reasonsToAllow (reasonToForbid : reasonsToForbid) x =
-- …unless there are good reasons to forbid X
if reasonToForbid `isAGoodReasonToForbid` x
then
if none isAGoodReasonToAllow reasonsToAllow
then False -- forbid
else weighUp reasonsToAllow (reasonToForbid : reasonsToForbid) x
else allow reasonsToAllow reasonsToForbid x -- recurse
You can say that mere lack of good reasons to forbid it is itself good reason to allow it, but when I say, “[even without any] good reasons to allow it”, I don’t mean whatever good reasons the developer has for defaulting to allowing, I mean whatever reasons are being provided as input to the function that are reified as ReasonToAllow; essentially we don’t count the reasons we default to allowing as “reasons [proper] to allow X”.
Another way to phrase it in the allow function analogy is, “don’t require that the user provide good reasons to allow a thing if there are none to forbid it”.
I mean, just go back to the context of the original comment:
A commenter says, “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software”, and the comment under discussion responds, “I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.”
He’s simply expressing a philosophical point that rather than things being legal because the law allows them, things are illegal because the law forbids them, and that’s how it should be (in a free society).
Anything that a legal system doesn’t explicitly forbid (with laws) or allow is implicitly allowed by a catch-all law that allows things by default (whether it’s written anywhere or not).
I honestly don’t get what’s so difficult to understand about that or how it’s tautological.
Can you explain how “there are good reasons to forbid them” is equivalent to “they should be forbidden”, given that we also have to consider whether the reasons to allow them outweigh the reasons to forbid them before we can say they should be forbidden?
I don’t think they are necessarily equivalent, but I think the “unless” is confusing things.
here is a rough derivation:
things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them
X should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid X
if not (there are good reasons to forbid X) then (X should be allowed)
if there are no good reasons to forbid X, then X should not be forbidden
if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden.
wouldn’t you agree that the last statement is a truism or a tautology? if you take issue with any of the steps, refer to your statement that “you’re being way too literal, which is not how human language works.”
Let me try to explain it another way then.
I almost included “the world is not a .vimrc file” at the end of my last comment because obviously I know what a default is in that context. I’m sorry that you wrote all that but analogizing to a software system doesn’t help me understand what being or allowed or forbidden “by default” would mean in the context of a company trying to do something in the real world. has the default case ever been reached? has it ever not been reached?
He’s simply expressing a philosophical point that rather than things being legal because the law allows them, things are illegal because the law forbids them, and that’s how it should be (in a free society).
Anything that a legal system doesn’t explicitly forbid (with laws) or allow is implicitly allowed by a catch-all law that allows things by default (whether it’s written anywhere or not).
I don’t think either comment was specifically referring to the law, but this is true even in totalitarian societies. no legal system attempts to enumerate everything that is allowed.
things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them
X should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid X
if not (there are good reasons to forbid X) then (X should be allowed)
if there are no good reasons to forbid X, then X should not be forbidden
if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden.
My original comment with the code sample was even longer at first, and I actually ripped this segment out:
Initially, I thought you were interpreting his statement that,
Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
as equivalent to,
Things should be allowed unless they shouldn’t be allowed.
but are you interpreting it as,
Things shouldn’t be forbidden unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
So it looks like I’m on the right track.
wouldn’t you agree that the last statement is a truism or a tautology?
A truism, yes, a tautology, no.
[…] but this is true even in totalitarian societies. no legal system attempts to enumerate everything that is allowed.
Sure, sure, but the original commenter was making a point that it definitely shouldn’t be this way in a free society. I don’t disagree that even totalitarian systems don’t attempt to enumerate what’s allowed instead of enumerating what’s disallowed.
analogizing to a software system doesn’t help me understand what being or allowed or forbidden “by default” would mean in the context of a company trying to do something in the real world. has the default case ever been reached? has it ever not been reached?
[…]
I don’t think either comment was specifically referring to the law,
No, the context is not merely a company trying to do something in the real world. It’s a discussion on whether the EU should force Apple to open up its iOS app store.
Yes, in law, the default case gets reached all the time, and non-default cases get reached all the time. (If you’re gonna read that overly literal, too, I should clarify that by, “all the time”, I don’t mean that all cases reach both the default and non-default handlers, I mean that at any given point in time, there’s people doing things that the law implicitly allows (the default) and also people doing things that the law does not allow (non-default).)
Within that context (of the discussion on whether the EU should force Apple to open up its iOS app store), a commenter says:
There’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software.
The implication one can pick up from that, whether they intended it to be read that way or not, is a “therefore, the EU should forbid Apple from selling its locked down platform [within its jurisdiction]”.
Our original commenter is responding to that and saying:
I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
In other words: no, you can’t just imply “it should be prohibited because there’s no good reason to allow it”. The first commenter is implying a rule of, “things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them”, and our original commenter is responding, no, “things should be allowed unless there good reasons to forbid them”, which is an oppositional axiom.
You can say the latter is a truism (in the sense that it’s axiomatic, not tautological), but it still has to be said when the first commenter’s statement is adopting the opposite axiom as a premise. Sometimes, things that seem obvious have to be restated.
The point is just that it’s not on anyone to provide a good reason why Apple should be allowed to sell their locked down platform.
The first burden is on those wanting to prohibit it to provide a justification for why it should be prohibited, and if they can’t give any, then it should just be permitted by default for whatever good reasons we default to permitting things, regardless of whether anyone can provide the EU a good reason to specifically permit this thing (that are separate from those good reasons we’ve adopted permitting as the default).
Sure, I understand that there are many reasons people will give that will be the background of the discussion, but the statement, “there’s no good reason to allow […], therefore we should forbid it” should never even enter as part of the discussion.
If you do bring that in, know that you’re challenging the axiom that things should be permitted by default, in which case you can’t just dump it in a conversation as if it’s already known/accepted/assumed that prohibition is the default.
You have to be very selective in your reading to think that the concept of “people’s rights” applies to huge economic structures with the power to shape society.
So you definitely understood that the context of the discussion was about law, so I’m still struggling to understand how you didn’t understand the simple point that the commenter was making without turning it into a tautology.
so you agree that the last statement is a truism, but you apparently don’t agree that the first statement is a truism because the rest of your comment is trying to derive some non-obvious meaning from it. at which step in the derivation would you say it starts being a truism?
for what it’s worth, the current paywalled version of the OED includes this in its definitions of “tautology”: “An argument, explanation, or definition that merely restates in different words the very thing which is to be explained, shown, or defined.”
by the nature of how human language works, and the pointlessness of being “too literal,” I don’t know if it’s useful to keep arguing over the difference between truism and tautology and whether the statement is a good enough match for the definition. I think you understand what I meant.
No, the context is not merely a company trying to do something in the real world. It’s a discussion on whether the EU should force Apple to open up its iOS app store.
I assume you are saying “no” because you disagree that the comments in question extend beyond matters of law. well consider the phrase “that practice deserves to get shut down.” I think extralegal means such as protest, public denunciation, etc. are well within the scope of that idea, at least in the context of the comment.
Yes, in law, the default case gets reached all the time, and non-default cases get reached all the time. (If you’re gonna read that overly literal, too, I should clarify that by, “all the time”, I don’t mean that all cases reach both the default and non-default handlers, I mean that at any given point in time, there’s people doing things that the law implicitly allows (the default) and also people doing things that the law does not allow (non-default).)
so is there ever a case where someone is forbidden from doing something by default?
Within that context (of the discussion on whether the EU should force Apple to open up its iOS app store), a commenter says:
There’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software.
The implication one can pick up from that, whether they intended it to be read that way or not, is a “therefore, the EU should forbid Apple from selling its locked down platform [within its jurisdiction]”.
more or less. a more precise reading would be that the EU should allow plaintiffs to sue in such cases! [INFO HAZARD]
Our original commenter is responding to that and saying:
I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.
In other words: no, you can’t just imply “it should be prohibited because there’s no good reason to allow it”. The first commenter is implying a rule of, “things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them”, and our original commenter is responding, no, “things should be allowed unless there good reasons to forbid them”, which is an oppositional axiom.
and I think both of those axioms are truisms and tautologies in the everyday sense of the words.
You can say the latter is a truism (in the sense that it’s axiomatic, not tautological), but it still has to be said when the first commenter’s statement is adopting the opposite axiom as a premise. Sometimes, things that seem obvious have to be restated.
sometimes indeed.
The point is just that it’s not on anyone to provide a good reason why Apple should be allowed to sell their locked down platform.
The first burden is on those wanting to prohibit it to provide a justification for why it should be prohibited, and if they can’t give any, then it should just be permitted by default for whatever good reasons we default to permitting things, regardless of whether anyone can provide the EU a good reason to specifically permit this thing (that are separate from those good reasons we’ve adopted permitting as the default).
how about this: “there’s no good reason to allow killing someone just because they trespassed on your property.”
then someone responds: “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.”
do you think the first speaker should be expected to preemptively state their reasons for why killing should be prohibited? are they implying that things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them?
Sure, I understand that there are many reasons people will give that will be the background of the discussion, but the statement, “there’s no good reason to allow […], therefore we should forbid it” should never even enter as part of the discussion.
so does that apply to the above?
If you do bring that in, know that you’re challenging the axiom that things should be permitted by default, in which case you can’t just dump it in a conversation as if it’s already known/accepted/assumed that prohibition is the default.
so the first speaker in my example is “challenging the axiom that things should be permitted by default”????????
You have to be very selective in your reading to think that the concept of “people’s rights” applies to huge economic structures with the power to shape society.
So you definitely understood that the context of the discussion was about law, so I’m still struggling to understand how you didn’t understand the simple point that the commenter was making without turning it into a tautology.
the literature on people’s rights extends beyond matters of law.
so you agree that the last statement is a truism, but you apparently don’t agree that the first statement is a truism
No, I agree that the first statement in the derivation list is also a truism, I don’t agree that it’s a tautology.
I still don’t see the repetition in, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden”, unless you want to say “should X” is actually identical to, rather than what naturally follows from, “good reason to X”.
But even then, that would make the statement “should not X” identical to “good reason to not X”, rather than identical to “no good reason to X”
So again, I don’t think it was a tautology, I think it was an axiomatic truth that was being implicitly challenged and needed to be made explicit so that the discussion could continue with everyone understanding where they each stand.
Even if the implicit challenge was a misreading, the first commenter could just respond, “I think you misunderstood me, I’m not challenging that axiom”.
because the rest of your comment is trying to derive some non-obvious meaning from it.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the meaning of “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” is “we should permit things by default”.
Just like it’s obvious that when a friend says, “whatever happens happens”, he means, based on the context, “let’s not worry too much about things we can’t control or prepare for”, or “we don’t really have much to lose, let’s just go for it and if we lose our investment, it’s no big deal”, or whatever.
for what it’s worth, the current paywalled version of the OED includes this in its definitions of “tautology”: “An argument, explanation, or definition that merely restates in different words the very thing which is to be explained, shown, or defined.”
No problem with that definition, it’s pretty much what we already agreed on earlier in the discussion. I even gave the example of the three-sided triangle.
by the nature of how human language works, and the pointlessness of being “too literal,” I don’t know if it’s useful to keep arguing over the difference between truism and tautology and whether the statement is a good enough match for the definition. I think you understand what I meant.
I’m happy to skip debating the definition of those two words, you just tell me what you meant by it, because I’m not sure I do understand, still.
If you were using tautology to mean “truism”, then sure, the statement was a tautology, but if you were using it with a definition like this in mind, then no, it wasn’t a tautology (and if you think this definition applies to “truism” as well, then no, it’s not a truism either).
Just let me know which one you meant by it, I’m not interested in debating the definitions of words except to understand a third-party’s usage; between us, I’m happy to use the term tautology to mean axiom if you like.
I assume you are saying “no” because you disagree that the comments in question extend beyond matters of law. well consider the phrase “that practice deserves to get shut down.” I think extralegal means such as protest, public denunciation, etc. are well within the scope of that idea, at least in the context of the comment.
The comment’s immediate context was law, so that’s the safest meaning we can safely glean from it. The parent said:
It sounds like the litigators want to load their own software on Apple hardware and use legislation to force that?
Sounds bogus to me.
The comment quoted the “sounds bogus to me” and his comment was a response to that. In other words, he’s clearly intending his rule of “no good reason to allow it, [so don’t allow it]” to apply in the legal sense and agreeing with the litigators.
He may also intend his opinion to apply extra-legally, or even illegally, but we can’t assume that.
That said, it wouldn’t make much sense that he’s advocating for prohibiting Apple from that action using the full force of the law, but not by boycotting Apple, for example. So I’m happy to extend it to extra-legal means, but he certainly meant it in the legal sense.
I would also say that the rule of allowing others to do as they wish unless there are good reasons to forbid it also applies extra-legally, so the objection still works.
so is there ever a case where someone is forbidden from doing something by default?
In law? Nothing pops to mind.
how about this: “there’s no good reason to allow killing someone just because they trespassed on your property.”
then someone responds: “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.”
do you think the first speaker should be expected to preemptively state their reasons for why killing should be prohibited? are they implying that things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them?
A charitable interpretation of the first statement there would be, “someone trespassing on your property isn’t a good reason to kill them”.
The good reasons we don’t kill trespassers are the same good reasons we don’t kill people in general.
The disagreement that person would be having is whether there are or aren’t good reasons to kill trespassers in particular (or, put another way, whether trespassing is a good reason, and the reasons it’s a good reason, etc. however far you wanna go).
They’d almost certainly both agree that there are good reasons not to kill in general. So he’s presumably saying, “someone trespassing isn’t a good reason to kill them” to someone who he knows or suspects disagrees, to make explicit where he stands.
If someone said, “there’s no good reason to allow killing someone” full stop, in the context of responding to someone saying “it’s bogus” that someone is being charged for killing — with the obvious context that he’s saying killing people should just be allowed, not that the charged is innocent — I’d say they were doing a severely poor job of arguing that we shouldn’t kill people.
The reason we don’t allow killing people is not because we lack good reason to allow it.
Sure, I understand that there are many reasons people will give that will be the background of the discussion, but the statement, “there’s no good reason to allow […], therefore we should forbid it” should never even enter as part of the discussion.
so does that apply to the above?
Yes.
so the first speaker in my example is “challenging the axiom that things should be permitted by default”????????
See above.
So you definitely understood that the context of the discussion was about law, so I’m still struggling to understand how you didn’t understand the simple point that the commenter was making without turning it into a tautology.
the literature on people’s rights extends beyond matters of law.
Yes, but this conversation was about legal proceedings.
I’m happy to extend it beyond law, because in this instance, I think if he has this stance for law, by greater reason, he’d have it for extra-legal ways of prohibiting something which are generally less severe prohibition.
I only mean to point out that he has this stance even as far as the law; I wanted to make it explicit that his stance includes legal means, not to imply that it excludes extra-legal means.
I think it’s fair for me to ask that you clearly and directly answer the question I asked in bold. without that I don’t feel motivated to invest time in crafting a response to all that text. okay?
If the context is that they’re responding to someone who simply doesn’t agree that killing in the general case should be prohibited, and they’re aware of this (or aware that it’s a reasonable possibility), then I’d say yes, they are implying that things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them.
My “no” answer is assuming a normal scenario, where the disagreement they’re having is specifically about whether trespassing is a good reason, and the context makes that obvious, because I don’t know anyone who agrees that killing in the general case should be allowed.
Literally speaking, that’s what they’re implying either way, but with some charity in the right context, I can see that it’s unintentional, and what they really mean is, “someone trespassing on your property isn’t a good reason to overturn the established, agreed upon rule against killing them, which we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit”.
Maybe the conversation in a normal scenario goes something like this:
There’s a news story of a trespasser killed submitted to a link-sharing site.
Commenters argue about whether the shooter should have been charged.
It turns into an argument about whether the law should allow shooting trespassers.
Our commenter says, “there’s no good reason to allow killing someone just because they trespassed on your property”.
Their intention becomes clear because they themselves are bringing up a reason that others might appeal to as an alleged good reason to kill someone, and the action being considered for prohibition is already almost-universally agreed upon to be something that should be prohibited in the general case.
Neither of those considerations apply to this thread.
Literally speaking, that’s what they’re implying either way, but with some charity in the right context, I can see that it’s unintentional, and what they really mean is, “someone trespassing on your property isn’t a good reason to overturn the established, agreed upon rule against killing them, which we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit”.
and yet you don’t think a reasonable, charitable interpretation of “there’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software” could be “we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit such closed platforms and there’s no reason to allow it that outweighs the reasons to prohibit it”?
instead you think the only reasonable interpretation is one that implies “things should be forbidden by default,” something that has never happened and that you couldn’t even speculate on what being forbidden by default would look like???
I could extend that charity now, especially if the original author clarified that’s what they meant.
But secondly — yes, secondly, I’ll get to the firstly secondly, in a second — even with that interpretation, it was still relevant to explicitly assert the truism, because if the implication of the first interpretation is that “things should be forbidden by default”, then the implication of the second interpretation is that, “it’s already settled that we agree there are good reasons monopolistic locked platforms shouldn’t be allowed”.
Which I hope also addresses your point that:
instead you think the only reasonable interpretation is one that implies “things should be forbidden by default,” something that has never happened and that you couldn’t even speculate on what being forbidden by default would look like???
Besides the fact that it’s not unusual for people to hold a belief the logical conclusions of which are insane and they’d never agree to, but they don’t see how that is the logical conclusion, and when it is shown to them, they abandon the belief.
And firstly, that interpretation doesn’t jump out as even a possibility that we could charitably select above other, less charitable interpretations, given the context of the discussion up to that point.
In your example, the comment isn’t “there are no good reasons to allow X”, it’s “there are no good reasons to allow X just because Y”, set in a context where no one argues that X in the general case should be permissible.
Two differences, one in the background context, and one in the wording, but it leads the interpreter’s mind elsewhere, and things that might have required reading the commenter’s mind in this thread become things we can assume for charity’s sake in your disanalogous example.
In your example, it’s obvious that the discussion rests on the premise that everybody agrees killing should not be permitted in the general case and we have various reasons that people accept this, and trespassing has specifically been brought up, so the point under contention is clearly whether trespassing is a good enough reason to overturn the reasons for not killing someone.
In this thread, it’s not obvious at all that people all agree that locked monopolistic platforms, for example, should be permitted or not, so if a commenter says, “there are no good reasons to allow locked monopolistic platforms”, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “things should be permitted by default”;
it’s essentially implying “you tell us why we should prohibit this [so we can debate the merits of your case]; we’re not going to just assume that it’s already been settled that it should be prohibited and we’re talking about hearing good, novel reasons to allow it that outweigh the reasons to prohibit it”.
That’s not even the charitable reading of the response to me, it’s the obvious interpretation that jumps out to me. I don’t find your less charitable version an even tenable reading.
None of this makes the response a tautology, though. I’m still unclear whether you’re saying it’s a truism or a tautology or both, and what definition of both of these terms you’re using.
As I said, I’m happy to just use your definition without debate and tell you whether it’s I think a tautology under a specific definition, but I’ll of course maintain that if you’re using tautology to mean truism or axiom, then you’re wrong and this whole discussion could have been avoided by using the term tautology correctly.
(And even if I charitably take your usage to mean “truism”, then it still wouldn’t work because, as I said above, the truism was, in this context, relevant to explicitly assert.)
I understand very little of what you’ve written, and the parts that I understand I completely disagree with.
Besides the fact that it’s not unusual for people to hold a belief the logical conclusions of which are insane and they’d never agree to, but they don’t see how that is the logical conclusion, and when it is shown to them, they abandon the belief.
then wouldn’t that also apply to the castle doctrine example, if “literally speaking, that’s what they’re implying either way”?
if the implication of the first interpretation is that “things should be forbidden by default”, then the implication of the second interpretation is that, “it’s already settled that we agree there are good reasons monopolistic locked platforms shouldn’t be allowed”.
you said that it could be interpreted to mean “things should be forbidden by default.” if the second interpretation is “we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit such closed platforms and there’s no reason to allow it that outweighs the reasons to prohibit it,” that does not imply that “it’s already settled that we agree…” – it’s dumbfounding to read this.
then wouldn’t that also apply to the castle doctrine example, if “literally speaking, that’s what they’re implying either way”?
As I said, your interpretation doesn’t jump out as even a possibility (to me) that we could charitably select above other, less charitable interpretations, given the context of the discussion up to that point and the exact phrasing.
In my castle doctrine example, given the addition of the “just because they’re trespassing”, it’s obvious that the discussion is not about killing in the general case, because I can easily interpret the disagreement as being on reasons to overturn the prohibition of killing in the case of trespassers.
In this case, they didn’t say, “there’s no good reason to allow locked platforms just because there are other alternatives”, they said, “there’s no good reason to allow any [their emphasis] locked platform that doesn’t allow users to […]”.
The more charitable interpretation just doesn’t pop out at me as easily. And that doesn’t faze me like, “no, surely he couldn’t have meant that”, because I’d probably subconsciously just chalk it down to a brain fart on their part, and they just needed a reminder of the foundational rule.
you said that it could be interpreted to mean “things should be forbidden by default.” if the second interpretation is “we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit such closed platforms and there’s no reason to allow it that outweighs the reasons to prohibit it,” that does not imply that “it’s already settled that we agree…” – it’s dumbfounding to read this.
I’m saying I can accept that someone could mean “there’s no good reason to allow it” as a shorthand for “there are no good reasons to allow it that outweigh the reasons for prohibiting it”. But they’re responding to a comment that called the whole thing “bogus” because of the diversity of choice,
implying that there’s no good reason to prohibit a locked platform at least in this case,
yet they completely ignored that to shift the burden onto the other side to bring up good reasons to allow it, as if the burden is on the people who think it should be allowed, which, as far as I can see, would only be the case if either:
it’s simply a settled matter that there are good reasons to prohibit it that outweigh the reasons for allowing it (at least for this context where there are choices) and the discussion is about overturning it (at least for this context), or
it’s not settled, so we start from an empty set of agreed-upon reasons for or against either side of whether we should allow or prohibit it, in which case, we can immediately just tack on the agreed-on default-allow reason, putting the burden for arguing their case on the ones who think it should be prohibited.
I’m happy to hear a third option, but as far as I can see, either it’s a settled matter and so the burden is on the pro-allowance side, or it’s not a settled matter and the person who responded to that comment to shift the burden back to the pro-prohibition side by pointing out, “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” was completely in the right.
You can’t have your cake and eat it. Again, this wouldn’t faze me, I’d chalk it down to a brain fart, which is why the reminder of the basic rule seemed natural to me.
At this point, I’ve explained and over-explained why I interpreted things the way I did. If you’re gonna respond that you’re dumbfounded again, I can’t really do anything more — and I’m tired of having to keep asking you about where you stand on the tautology thing and what definition you want to use or anything about that — so let’s just end it here.
The more charitable interpretation just doesn’t pop out at me as easily. And that doesn’t faze me like, “no, surely he couldn’t have meant that”, because I’d probably subconsciously just chalk it down to a brain fart on their part, and they just needed a reminder of the foundational rule.
they needed a reminder of the foundational rule which has always applied and could never not apply even hypothetically… okay buddy.
If you’re gonna respond that you’re dumbfounded again, I can’t really do anything more — and I’m tired of having to keep asking you about where you stand on the tautology thing and what definition you want to use or anything about that — so let’s just end it here.
well if you’re still curious, I think the OED definition I gave is just fine: “An argument, explanation, or definition that merely restates in different words the very thing which is to be explained, shown, or defined.”
I thought the original statement was roughly equivalent to “if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden.” by the standards of everyday speech, I think “there are no good reasons to forbid X” is a mere restatement of “X should not be forbidden.” In contrast to a mere “reason,” a “good reason” can be understood as one that overrides the reasons for the contrary proposition.
they needed a reminder of the foundational rule which has always applied and could never not apply even hypothetically… okay buddy.
Yeah, that’s what a brain fart is. You can end up saying things that lead to insane conclusions and all you need is a that pointed out to you to realise you messed up in your train of thought somewhere.
And if they didn’t mean it that way, then they simply misspoke, and again, it’s useful to clarify the implication of their words so they can rephrase.
I think “there are no good reasons to forbid X” is a mere restatement of “X should not be forbidden.” In contrast to a mere “reason,” a “good reason” can be understood as one that overrides the reasons for the contrary proposition.
I understood “good reason” as one which isn’t fallacious or based on false premises or otherwise weak. So you can have a good reason that’s still outweighed by better reasons to do the opposite.
But let’s take your understanding.
Then we can go back to the understanding of the foundational reasons to allow things by default not being part of the set of reasons being referred to in the statement, “if there are no reasons to forbid something that aren’t outweighed by reasons to allow it, then it should be allowed”, so that it can be understood as, “things should be allowed by default”.
Such an interpretation would charitably remove the tautology at the cost of implying that the person is themselves being uncharitable to the person they’re responding to, by implying that they don’t know, or at least haven’t considered in their prior statement, that the burden is on them to give reasons to forbid that specific thing.
I still think the most charitable way to interpret the whole conversation is like:
A: “This is bogus, there’s plenty of competition.”
B: “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platforms.”
C: “[Why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it, since] things should be allowed by default.”
If we apply your charity to B, we can even say:
A: “This is bogus, there’s plenty of competition.”
B: “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platforms.”
C: “[Why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it, since] things should be allowed by default [and the reasons given for prohibiting locked platforms, like user choice, don’t apply].”
A response like, “why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it” is susceptible to an objection like, “why are you shifting the burden to the person who asked first for reasons to allow it? are you admitting there’s no good reason to allow it?”;
a response like, “the reasons given for prohibiting locked platforms don’t apply here” is susceptible to a response like, “they never gave any reasons”.
Given how easy it is to encounter people online who think waaay differently from yourself, you can’t blame them for writing defensively by bringing it back to basics, but you’ll never please everyone, I guess.
At the end of this, I understand how you could have reasonably interpreted it as a tautology.
I hope you can also understand how I could have reasonably interpreted the comment that was itself responding to as an incorrectly placed burden of ‘proof’ to the point that it needed to be pointed out (which people do in discussion and debate all the time).
If we both understand each other, there’s not much reason to keep arguing the point unless you have anything new to add.
And if they didn’t mean it that way, then they simply misspoke, and again, it’s useful to clarify the implication of their words so they can rephrase.
useful for what? I think you have to be willfully obtuse to think that they actually meant it in a way that implies the insane conclusion you suggested. if you don’t think that, we can agree to disagree, but really ask yourself if you’re being honest with yourself.
so I don’t see the value in “giving them the opportunity to rephrase.” if the goal is to address the topic of conversation, it can only derail, an in this case the derailment came immediately after the tautology in the very same comment.
I think “there are no good reasons to forbid X” is a mere restatement of “X should not be forbidden.” In contrast to a mere “reason,” a “good reason” can be understood as one that overrides the reasons for the contrary proposition.
I understood “good reason” as one which isn’t fallacious or based on false premises or otherwise weak. So you can have a good reason that’s still outweighed by better reasons to do the opposite.
that’s also a fine interpretation. two people can have different interpretations without either being incorrect.
A: “This is bogus, there’s plenty of competition.” B: “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platforms.” C: “[Why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it, since] things should be allowed by default [and the reasons given for prohibiting locked platforms, like user choice, don’t apply].”
I think this interpretation is at least as fair:
A: this is bogus, there’s plenty of competition
B: why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid suing on these grounds, since we know the EU parliament decided that the type of competition that exists is not a sufficient reason?
etc.
I hope you can also understand how I could have reasonably interpreted the comment that was itself responding to as an incorrectly placed burden of ‘proof’ to the point that it needed to be pointed out (which people do in discussion and debate all the time).
I agree that there was some rhetorical shifting of the burden of proof on both sides, but there was never agreement on who had the burden of proof to begin with. attempting to rhetorically shift the burden of proof back using a tautology is fair game, but so is pointing out that it’s a tautology. at least the previous comment, not being tautologous, meaningfully advanced the discussion… I consider bringing up a misreading of john locke to be a derailment and not meaningfully adding to the discussion, but maybe that’s just me.
nice to see some convergence in a discussion for once.
I think you have to be willfully obtuse to think that they actually meant it in a way that implies the insane conclusion you suggested. if you don’t think that, we can agree to disagree, but really ask yourself if you’re being honest with yourself.
Not really. People shift the burden of proof in obscene ways all the time, it’s an easy trap to fall into if you’re being intellectually lazy, or are even just too lazy to type or express yourself fully on a complex topic, looking for quick, easy putdowns to say to put the matter to bed.
I think it’d be insane if I believed they actually believed the implication, but I just don’t find it unusual for people to have beliefs that have extreme implications without noticing it; syllogistic reasoning is hard for most humans.
so I don’t see the value in “giving them the opportunity to rephrase.” if the goal is to address the topic of conversation, it can only derail, an in this case the derailment came immediately after the tautology in the very same comment.
It’s an opportunity for them to clarify your misunderstanding, giving you the more charitable interpretation that you failed to glean from the original statement.
I think you have to be willfully obtuse to think that they actually meant it in a way that implies the insane conclusion you suggested.
People routinely say things that have insane implications. I’ve already explained why it doesn’t faze me, but to add some thoughts here:
Even if I didn’t believe they meant it that way, how else is someone meant to respond to them shifting the burden of proof onto the opposition by saying, “no good reason to allow this”, except by saying, “hold on, let’s start the conversation from the start, the burden is on you to show why it should be forbidden”?
I can say that without believing that they truly mean those words but I make it clear that the only interpretation that’s coming to mind is one where their words imply insane conclusion X, and then they can just clarify.
If they’d dug their heels in and explicitly said, “no, things shouldn’t be allowed by default”, then I might start thinking, “what the hell, surely they can’t mean that? I must be misunderstanding”,
but before that point, you don’t really consciously question it, you might just think they misspoke, or you misunderstood, or they don’t realise the implication of their shifting of the burden of proof and would backtrack if shown it.
You might also assume it was just a moment of intellectual and/or keyboard laziness, and your job is to put up that objection that the burden of proof is on them, so nobody’s sitting there thinking the pro-prohibition arguments are already settled and agreed on.
I can understand why someone might be insulted, thinking, “what the hell, do they really think I don’t know that? Do they think I’m literally more extreme than every totalitarian state to ever exist?”, but that’s not necessarily the case. You’re just responding to and/or pointing out the implications of their words from the most charitable interpretation that comes to mind, even if it’s insane, and not really thinking anything of it, expecting that they’ll either realise their mistake or point out yours.
This is all happening subconsciously, so you might not even really register how insane your interpretation of their words’ implications (not the words themselves) sounds, but even if you do, as I said, you’d just chalk it down to them not realising the implications due to laziness, misspeaking, or not fully thinking through their belief to its logical conclusion (or you incorrectly attributing an implication that doesn’t exist and they’ll demonstrate your mistake).
I think moments like that pass by in many conversations, especially on contentious topics.
I think this interpretation is at least as fair:
A: this is bogus, there’s plenty of competition
B: why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid suing on these grounds, since we know the EU parliament decided that the type of competition that exists is not a sufficient reason?
Ehh, I’d wonder why B didn’t just make their disagreement explicit about the EU parliament deciding that the type of competition that exists is not a sufficient reason, since A seems to be unaware of that.
I agree that there was some rhetorical shifting of the burden of proof on both sides, but there was never agreement on who had the burden of proof to begin with. attempting to rhetorically shift the burden of proof back using a tautology is fair game, but so is pointing out that it’s a tautology.
Let’s use truism, since we agree that it’s at least a truism under both our initial interpretations, but only a tautology under your interpretation (and even then, I’m a bit iffy on whether it’s a tautology even under that interpretation, but I can see how it can be considered one).
I agree with “attempting to rhetorically shift the burden of proof back using a tautology truism is fair game”.
Anyway, I don’t deny it’s fair game to point out it’s a tautology if you think so. It’s just also fair game to question why you think it’s a tautology, and you explained, and now I get it :).
at least the previous comment, not being tautologous, meaningfully advanced the discussion…
Agreeing on truism, not necessarily tautology, I do think reiterating a truism can meaningfully advance the discussion; it’s not about the truism itself, it’s about what’s being implied by bringing it up (in the moment that you do): “let’s go back to the basics of the topic”.
I consider bringing up a misreading of john locke to be a derailment and not meaningfully adding to the discussion, but maybe that’s just me.
I’m not sure where John Locke comes into this, I’m not versed enough with his works to judge if it’s a misreading, but I thought we both agreed that even the most totalitarian state doesn’t forbid things by default? Or am I misunderstanding what part of the discussion you’re referring to here?
but if somebody says “I see no reason to allow killing people,” they don’t deserve the benefit of your generous help?
this is getting really tiresome and you are committing inconsistencies that suggest you aren’t giving due consideration to what has already been said. for example you previously said you were happy to use “tautology” according to my preferred usage; now you are insisting on “truism.” I can address your points if you keep them to a paragraph or two, but otherwise it’s really not worth the time at this point. sorry.
but if somebody says “I see no reason to allow killing people,” they don’t deserve the benefit of your generous help?
I think this will just be treading well-worn ground.
you previously said you were happy to use “tautology” according to my preferred usage; now you are insisting on “truism.”
By that, I just meant that I’m happy to not debate what the term means. In other words, I was happy to reinterpret your prior comments where you use “tautology” and read all instances as “truism” to address you on the substance.
Interpreting your prior comments with that definition and not arguing over semantics doesn’t mean I have to use the word.
I suggested we use “truism” because we both agree on its definition. I was trying, for common ground, to agree with you, but didn’t want to use the word myself, as I wanted to be ultra-clear what I was agreeing to, and I didn’t want my words to be taken out of context, even accidentally.
We’re already having enough trouble understanding each other, but looks like my attempt to be clearer just resulted in the opposite. I see that switching out “tautology” for “truism” may have insinuated that I interpreted you to not already have meant “truism” by “tautology” in that sentence; my bad, that wasn’t my intent.
I also used the distinction, which I didn’t anticipate earlier in this thread; for example, when I say, “I don’t deny it’s fair game to point out it’s a tautology”, because I specifically meant tautology there w/ my original definition (though, thinking about it now, both are probably fair game, really).
I should have clarified that I was using it with my original definition at that point. I didn’t realise in the moment how confusing I was being and just thoughtlessly used both words to signify a distinction.
Which was doubly bad, because I was just making a separate point, because you weren’t even using tautology in that sense when you said, “it’s fair game to point out it’s a tautology”; I missed that because, as I was proof-reading, I saw my sentence, “I don’t deny it’s fair game to point out it’s a truism”, and wanting to specifically mean “tautology”, I ‘corrected’ that sentence, forgetting it was a response to you using the word.
It’s been a long thread.
I can address your points if you keep them to a paragraph or two, but otherwise it’s really not worth the time at this point. sorry.
It’s hard to stick to one paragraph when there’s so much at contention every reply and, again, I’m trying to be as clear as possible.
Also, don’t apologise, I think we’ve both put more than enough time into this.
Interpreting your prior comments with that definition and not arguing over semantics doesn’t mean I have to use the word.
I suggested we use “truism” because we both agree on its definition. I was trying, for common ground, to agree with you, but didn’t want to use the word myself, as I wanted to be ultra-clear what I was agreeing to, and I didn’t want my words to be taken out of context, even accidentally.
compare this to:
Just let me know which one you meant by it, I’m not interested in debating the definitions of words except to understand a third-party’s usage; between us, I’m happy to use the term tautology to mean axiom if you like.
was it a mistake for me to assume that if you were happy to use “tautology” to mean “axiom,” you would be happy to use it in the sense that prompted you to say “I understand how you could have reasonably interpreted it as a tautology”? or am I on to something about you being inconsistent after such a long thread?
It’s hard to stick to one paragraph when there’s so much at contention every reply and, again, I’m trying to be as clear as possible.
you can strive for both clarity and succinctness while keeping to the most important points. if I addressed everything in contention in your comments, we would have an exponential explosion in comment length.
was it a mistake for me to assume that if you were happy to use “tautology” to mean “axiom,” you would be happy to use it in the sense that prompted you to say “I understand how you could have reasonably interpreted it as a tautology”?
I wasn’t entirely sure what you were saying here, but I went back and checked that, “I understand how […]” quote to look at the context.
I wrote that in response to:
I think “there are no good reasons to forbid X” is a mere restatement of “X should not be forbidden.”
In other words, the use of tautology here is not “truism”, but my original definition of restating in different words, despite this part of the conversation happening pretty soon after I’d said, “let me know which one you want to use”.
In fact, you say as much right before:
[…] and I’m tired of having to keep asking you about where you stand on the tautology thing and what definition you want to use or anything about that […]
[…] I think the OED definition I gave is just fine: “[…] restates in different words the very thing […]”
That’d probably explain why I started using “tautology” as “restating”. Because after I kept pestering you for which definition you want to use, you stuck with the OED definition of “restat[ing]” and used the word with that definition.
That might also explain why I continued to use the two words in distinct ways, and reworded (with strikethrough) your use of “tautology” to “truism” in the specific sentences where I suspected you were reverting to using it as such, to be clear that I interpreted it that way, or wanted to agree or disagree on the sentence as interpreted in that way.
or am I on to something about you being inconsistent after such a long thread?
As I said, I didn’t anticipate the need to use both words with their distinct meanings, instead of as synonyms, when I offered to interpret your words how you mean them without debating semantics.
Beyond that, I gave multiple reasons why I started to use tautology with my original definition again. Looks like I should add to the list: I asked you which definition to use, and you chose the OED one to the list. I had forgotten that, and it seems you had, too.
Probably we’ve both been inconsistent after such a long thread, at the very least in how we’ve expressed our points. It feels like you’re trying to reach for a gotcha instead of constructively trying to understand what I meant at various points.
I said earlier, “I should have clarified that I was using it with my original definition at that point”. I stand by that.
However, I see now that when I offered to let you choose a definition, you went with the OED one. So, I think you should take back your saying, “you previously said you were happy to use “tautology” according to my preferred usage; now you are insisting on “truism.””.
I found myself considering if you were using it to mean “truism” again, despite saying to use the OED definition, so I chose to be explicit and just use “truism” when I meant that or suspected you meant that.
Honestly, we should have probably just chose a third word or set of words to express ourselves for “tautology” and “truism”. I used “axiom” a few times to replace what I mean by “truism”.
you can strive for both clarity and succinctness while keeping to the most important points. if I addressed everything in contention in your comments, we would have an exponential explosion in comment length.
This whole thread has felt like an inquisition.
My words have dumbfounded you, exasperated you, provoked snark from you, and I’ve tried my best to engage with everything I could in good faith, admit where I made mistakes, and try to find common ground.
In response, it feels like, despite you calling for charitable interpretation, all you’ve done is interpret my words in the least charitable but still plausible way, trying to catch me out on contradictions (that could be resolved with some charity).
So I think I can be forgiven for overexplaining myself.
you don’t owe me anything and there’s nothing to forgive. I just think you could benefit from learning to focus on what’s important and to express yourself more clearly and succinctly.
it seems that we have largely resolved the question that started this thread. I’m not sure there’s much reason to continue. you seemed interested in why I thought you contradicted yourself, and I am still not convinced by your defense – my honest impression is that you are incapable of admitting a mistake, a very unfortunate condition, so I thought that showing it to you clearly might help. but if you aren’t enjoying the “inquisition” then I won’t keep pushing. and if you have admitted a mistake in this thread I wouldn’t mind seeing where so I can account for why I would have missed it. otherwise good luck.
my honest impression is that you are incapable of admitting a mistake, a very unfortunate condition, so I thought that showing it to you clearly might help.
I admitted several mistakes in this thread, AFAICT you admitted none.
if you have admitted a mistake in this thread I wouldn’t mind seeing
At least here:
As I said, I didn’t anticipate the need to use both words with their distinct meanings, instead of as synonyms, when I offered to interpret your words how you mean them without debating semantics.
and here:
I should have clarified that I was using it with my original definition at that point. I didn’t realise in the moment how confusing I was being and just thoughtlessly used both words to signify a distinction.
Which was doubly bad, because […]; I missed that because […], and wanting to […], I ‘corrected’ that sentence, forgetting it was […].
Mobile phones are important as their own category, laptops don’t replace them.
In the mobile market in the EU there is a strong Apple + Google duopoly. Apple does whatever they want, and Google has no incentive to be any better, because there’s no third mass-market option that could threaten their business.
Android is also becoming increasingly more closed. Google uses access to the PlayStore and its proprietary Android libraries (required by lots of apps) as a way to control Android vendors, and prevent them from removing Google’s self-promotion and control from Android.
This isn’t a healthy competitive market. It’s two landlords who can dictate any terms they want.
The EU is going after Apple at the behest of companies like Spotify and Epic.
This is not incorrect, but imprecise…
This is a fight between large companies and we just have to hope we don’t get >trampled in the process.
…and this is incorrect. The actual situation is as follows: The European Commission has formally asserted that Apple is a “gatekeeper” under Art. 3 DMA on 2023-09-06. Art. 3(1) DMA gives the criteria when a “gatekeeper” is to be assumed. Art. 3(4) DMA mandates the Commission to designate a company as a “gatekeeper” ex officio and does not depend on a request from a private party. The formal designation as a “gatekeeper” by the Commission causes certain duties of interoperability for the designated which are laid out in other articles of the DMA.
From the talk’s description – I have not watched the talk myself – I conclude that Apple is challenging the first decision – the designation as a gatekeeper under Art. 3 DMA by the Commission – in court now. That decision of the Commission is formally binding against a specific private company (Apple) and can as such be brought directly before the European Courts as per Art. 263(4) TFEU. As per Art. 256(1)(1) TFEU, it is to be brought before the European Court of the first instance, which is not – as the headline implies – “the EU’s highest court”, but rather, well, the court of the first instance. Against this court’s decision it is possible to appeal as per Art. 256(1)(2) TFEU to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which then is the “highest EU court” for this case as it is not possible to further contest its decision.
If the courts decide in favour of Apple, the Commission’s designation of Apple as a “gatekeeper” is void and Apple does not have to comply with the DMA at all, making the aforementioned second proceedings irrelevant.
In any case, Epic and other companies are not direct parties to the lawsuit at hand, and neither is the FSFE. It is a lawsuit between Apple the European Commission in the first place, and any other people are only involved on a secondary level, which may include – as it seems to be the case with the FSFE – some special privilegues, which probably mostly amount to the ability to testify in some way or another. I’m not firm enough in CJEU process law to answer this question in detail. As is however widely known, CJEU process law does not include a possibility to submit amicus curiae briefs, thus the FSFE’s formal secondary involvement probably is intended to substitute that.
Here’s a simple one: without the DMA, you cannot run actual Chrome or Firefox on iOS. They’re just skins on top of Safari’s WebKit.
Oh, want to run an emulator on iOS? That was banned by their Store Guidelines. These are software blocks that artificially limit what you can run on hardware you’re supposed to own.
I have an old iPod I can’t really use anymore, because the iTunes Store APIs have changed, and it can’t talk to Apple anymore.
Here’s a possible future we avoided: without anti-competitive legislation, we might all still be stuck supporting Internet Explorer. The web exploded once that monopolistic lever was cut.
If it weren’t for being stuck in Apple’s castle, an iPhone would be on the cards, as the hardware is generally better than the rest. But then I’m stuck with the artificial limitations Apple enforce, that aren’t a function of the hardware. Heck, even Apple laptops pre-ARM were more functional running Windows than macOS because of the way they lock down hardware with their software. I still use Windows on my old MacBook Air because (for me), it’s actually better. I’d love to be able to do similar with their phones.
I’ve read through the answers to my question (and the currently highest rated comment). Thank you. None of them are satisfactory to me.
To me the best out come for an economy is that people can vote with their wallets. Government trying to micromanage product design is not going to be a good thing. All it does is it encourages deep pockets (the corporations) to become entangled even deeper with politics and establish stronger anti-competitive regulations.
The only think I would want from my government is to ensure that the current deep pockets don’t stifle innovation. So, if a small company was offering a platform as the people here seem to want, all I would want is regulation to see that such companies are not crushed by anything other than lack of demand.
There are actually efforts to build such open phones. Pine phone was one I think. A much more fruitful question is to ask, why is it not more successful. Attacking the current leader in innovation is not a a productive long term strategy.
Companies are already using their deep pockets. That’s precisely why the people need the government to step in for them instead.
Relating to open projects, the market is not a level playing field. There’s very strong network effects: apps people need for their daily life are not functional outside the two major OSes. Sometimes intentionally like most bank apps. My bank even blocks my desktop browser because it’s hardened!
Projects like the Pinephone are great but it’s not even been the year of the Linux desktop yet, so Linux mobile won’t be close to usable for most people any time soon.
Right now the most realistic way of giving more autonomy to users is by opening those 2 walled gardens, and that requires government intervention because it’s contrary to the companies’ incentives.
The US is highly criticised for it’s two-party system, where a vote has little value outside of voting for the two monopolies. Would a two-corporation software ecosystem be a fair system for voting with your wallet? There has to be a protection of the currently fairly open ecosystem, so that it can’t degrade into a closed ecosystem.
I’m my neck of the woods, WhatsApp decides which mobile operating systems are viable. Some people can live without WhatsApp, but for many it’s a huge pain. The DMA’s term of gatekeeper fits like a glove perfectly.
I doubt that WhatsApp interop will suffice to move the needle significantly, but it’s certainly a huge blocker in increasing ecosystem diversity.
I like this point. My interpretation of your statement:
Most people are using the phone as a tool.
One important feature of this tool is a communications network.
WhatsApp is a communication network.
I conclude that all most people want is a phone that runs WhatsApp. At least in the US there are thousands of choices. Esoteric arguments over a third OS outside of Apple and Android are exactly that: esoteric.
Those “thousands of choices” are all Android devices, and Google controls the terms under which an OEM is allowed to ship it. The power structures under consideration are based on OS and app marketplace vendor, of which there are only two. So it’s hardly an “esoteric argument” to say your choices are fundamentally limited.
You can see this when you go to any website that also offers an app - they show you two options for download: Android and Google. If there were viable alternatives, app makers would target them. At this point it’s like Microsoft’s stranglehold on personal computing in the nineties: it’s hard for anyone to break through because there’s such a strong monopoly in place (or, in this case, a duopoly). At least back then you could dual boot.
You missed the ditty about people not wanting a quarter-inch drill, but wanting quarter-inch holes.
People want a communications network. I have never met anyone who wanted WhatsApp, they wanted to communicate.
I cannot think of many things which are as dependent on network effects as instant messaging.
The WhatsApp monopoly in my country stifles innovation by raising the barrier to entry massively. If I want to make a popular mobile operating system I must either convince WhatsApp to release their app for my phone before it has sufficient market share to matter to them or be so irrealistically good that people will switch and force people using Android/iOS to install a new instant messaging app. You likely thing this is doable, in practice, historically, very few of these things have happened.
Unfortunately, for-profit companies are only aligned with their profits. Sometimes this aligns with customer benefit, but when they don’t align, companies have chosen to screw with customers to make money nearly every time.
Hence, the EU intervening and forcing WhatsApp to be interoperable IMHO is likely going to result in a benefit for the customers. However, so many actions like those are needed to move the needle significantly…
Some of this is even a taxpayer-funded problem. I stopped paying the TV License Fee (which funds the BBC) almost 20 years ago. My TV had broken a year earlier so I didn’t need one, but I was happy to support BBC News. Then they launched iPlayer, as a Windows-only service. Later, they explicitly wrote iOS and Android apps. This was tax money being spent on something that locked people into the dominant software platforms. They could have provided an open API and let anyone who wanted their platform to work with iPlayer implement a client, but they didn’t, they made it impossible to stream to anything except a blesses platform.
Ironically (given that Microsoft persuaded them to use Silverlight for the original version to lock people into Windows), this was one of the things that killed Windows Phone in the UK: it was the only phone that you couldn’t watch the BBC on.
I’ve read through the answers to my question (and the currently highest rated comment). Thank you. None of them are satisfactory to me.
Then why not reply to the comments and explain why they aren’t satisfactory?
Government trying to micromanage product design is not going to be a good thing. All it does is it encourages deep pockets (the corporations) to become entangled even deeper with politics and establish stronger anti-competitive regulations.
Can you unpack that? Don’t companies already have sufficient incentive to oppose competition in whatever ways they can?
The only think I would want from my government is to ensure that the current deep pockets don’t stifle innovation. So, if a small company was offering a platform as the people here seem to want, all I would want is regulation to see that such companies are not crushed by anything other than lack of demand.
There are actually efforts to build such open phones. Pine phone was one I think. A much more fruitful question is to ask, why is it not more successful. Attacking the current leader in innovation is not a a productive long term strategy.
It’s clear you want things that other people don’t want, and that’s fine. But your last sentence seems completely fatuous. If people want to oppose a tyranny that is innovating in the commoditization of human interaction, attacking them may very well be productive toward that goal.
The Digital Markets Act definitely is one of the better EU laws. I value it at a similar regard as the GDPR, and hope the EC will not bow before Apple’s anti-competitive lobbyism and a potentially looming trade war. The FSF Europe is playing a crucial part in this, thank you!
I do hope for a future where everyone will be able to use their own devices to the extent and capabilities they see fit. In that regard, I also hope the EC will rule the Core Technology Fee to be in violation of the DMA. Apple is making enough profit off their devices as-is, there is zero reason for them to collect additional fees on software distributed outside their own infrastructure.
Many people are asking “Why force Apple to open up their platforms? Why don’t the users just pick another platform to run their software on?”. If you are genuinely interested in the long answer, I strongly recommend “Chokepoint Capitalism” and “The Internet Con” by Cory Doctorow
This guy. I can’t tell his NY Times bestselling fiction apart from his NY Times bestselling nonfiction. At least his YA novels are clearly distinguishable by the cover graphic design. Anyway, I really don’t understand why he (or somebody!) can’t put up a free, concise summary of his argument(s?) if they’re so important. It always seems to boil down to more government regulation, as though regulatory capture hasn’t already paved so many miles of the road we’re on.
Anyway, here’s a randomly selected book review.
that’s an amazing sentence.
Thanks for the links. As for a summary, I think he regularly writes blogposts and columns and appears on podcasts and gives talks. Here is a random interview I found where the first two questions are about interoperability and regulatory capture.
What is the tl;dr on this issue? It sounds like the litigators want to load their own software on Apple hardware and use legislation to force that?
Sounds bogus to me. There’s a gazillion hardware platforms. Pick an android device. Pick any of a thousand laptop brands.
It does sound like the EU is going after Apple for populist + cash machine reasons.
There’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software. Doesn’t matter if there are other options. I’m not sure if it’s hubris or greed from Apple, but it doesn’t serve the public, and that practice deserves to get shut down.
It also sets a dangerous precedent, which other companies may follow. Given enough of such locked down vendors, overall software freedom would erode enough to become a real problem. So even if now there’s the excuse that there are plenty of “more open” alternatives, it’s still fundamentally unacceptable IMO.
Besides, it’s not like there’s a huge amount of choice on mobile…
I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them. I’m not a libertarian; but modern democratic thought, from the Declaration of Independence through the UN Charter on Human Rights, starts with people’s rights.
If I want to sell you a machine with a black box inside it that’s welded shut, that’s my right. You are welcome to try to hacksaw your black box, of course, or to buy a competing device that’s not locked.
In most of the world, that’s not true. In fact most of the world forbids you from even trying to look inside the black box other than for specific purposes. The law is already heavily imbalanced in favor of the black box manufacturers.
See 17 USC §1201, or 2001/29/EC Art. 6 for those I’m aware of.
The reality is capitalism doesn’t work this way. Modern history suggests that pretty much the first thing capital does when operating in truly unfettered markets is to try to form monopolies, or at the very least cartels. The US discovered this the hard way which is how they ended up passing the quintessential modern “anti-trust” legislation - which of course the neoliberals have spent the last 40-odd years trying to dilute.
I don’t believe in “truly unfettered markets”, and they don’t exist anywhere; that’s a straw man. Nor is there a monopoly/cartel here: Apple has strong competitors in Google, Samsung, Microsoft, etc., none of whom have control over the phone or OS market. Apple doesn’t even have 50% market share. Things are a lot better than in the mid-90s when Microsoft was in a monopolistic position.
I agree, and so does the DMA. That’s why it only kicks in for companies that have achieved a certain level of market dominance that allows them sell things that are not what the customers want, but which the customers must buy because of other features. The Android / iOS duopoly is so entrenched that Microsoft was not able to successfully enter the market with a competing product. If you look at the main iOS or Android stores, there are so many apps that there’s a huge lock-in effect. Even switching from iOS to Android or vice versa is often hard because there’s often at least one app that doesn’t have a direct equivalent (and a lot more that require you to buy them again for the other platform).
Tautology detected.
You have to be very selective in your reading to think that the concept of “people’s rights” applies to huge economic structures with the power to shape society.
How’s that a tautology?
All it means is that things should be allowed by default (i.e. not denied by default).
Can you point out where the repetition is (in the original phrasing)?
You are begging the question that there is repetition in the original phrasing; nobody said there was.
What do you mean by tautology, then?
A statement that is true by the definition of its terms and thus adds nothing to the discussion.
Right, which is essentially a form of repetition. Not necessarily word for word, but that wasn’t what I meant.
Tautologies add nothing to the discussion because they restate what was already part of the discussion, implied or explicit.
It’s like saying “all triangles have 3 sides”; well, yeah, “triangle” already means “3-sided”, so the sentence is equivalent to saying, “all 3-sided [objects] have 3 sides”.
I’m really not seeing how that’s the case in the original comment under discussion:
If you wanted to tweak it to be tautological, it’d be something like:
“There are good reasons to forbid them” is not equivalent to “they should be forbidden”, because when looking at whether we “should” do something, we don’t only look at whether there are good reasons to do so, we also consider if there are any good reasons not to do so and make a decision by weighing up the pros and cons.
When you consider his point charitably, it’s clear he’s saying, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something and there are no good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it”.
Ironically, his statement may have been more obviously not tautological if he’d restated it by contrasting it with its opposite, like so: “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them [rather than being forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them]” — thus making it obvious that his point was, as I said, “things should be allowed by default”.
so repetition, but not necessarily “in the original phrasing.”
but then the statement itself is a good reason to allow the thing, so the antecedent can never be true and the statement is vacuous.
At this point, I think you’re being way too literal, which is not how human language works.
Yes, if you want to rephrase his point as, “there being no good reasons to forbid something is itself a good reason to allow it”, which is again, just another way of saying, “things should be allowed by default”, then feel free to do that.
You clearly understand his point.
But let me play the literal game with you for a bit. The statement, “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” can be interpreted, even literally as, “things [in general] should be allowed unless there are good reasons to ban them [in particular]”.
In other words, equivocate on “things” (which we refer to as “them” in the second usage).
Sure, for any given class of things you try to evaluate this rule on, it’ll reduce to, “X’s should be allowed unless there are good reasons to ban X’s”, but as my dictionary claims in its sample sentence for “tautology” anyway, “all logical propositions are reducible to either tautologies or contradictions”.
Sounds good to me!
I understand it to be a truism. I don’t know what “by default” could mean in this context.
happy to play along but I didn’t follow this part.
I explain with some code analogies below, but I want to correct my previous statement that his rule is equivalent to:
In reality, it’s more like:
I also noticed you didn’t explicitly address this part of my previous comment:
Can you explain how “there are good reasons to forbid them” is equivalent to “they should be forbidden”, given that we also have to consider whether the reasons to allow them outweigh the reasons to forbid them before we can say they should be forbidden?
Let me try to explain it another way then. Imagine you’re writing a command for a CLI. Something like:
You have a configurable behaviour that’s set by a config file in
/etc, or a config file in~if that’s not there, or an environment variable$GHIif that’s not there, or a command line argument--ghi <value>if that’s not there.You can describe this as “if there’s no configured value in a good location, then default to X”. What you’re doing is the equivalent of saying, “but there is a configured value, the developers have configured the default” (defaulting to X — instead of erroring from a missing value, for example — is itself a configuration).
I mean, sure, you can say that, but it’s only a tautology if you force it to be one, since there’s a perfectly reasonable way of interpreting it a non-tautological way, which is by interpreting “a configured value” to simply not include the configuration given by the developers, even though literally speaking, it’s also configuration.
You could probably analogise other base cases in a recursive function. The statement “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” can be codified as the following recursive algorithm,
which is also an algorithmification of what I was getting at with my restatement of, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something, even without any good reasons to allow it, we should default to allowing it”:
You can say that mere lack of good reasons to forbid it is itself good reason to allow it, but when I say, “[even without any] good reasons to allow it”, I don’t mean whatever good reasons the developer has for defaulting to allowing, I mean whatever reasons are being provided as input to the function that are reified as
ReasonToAllow; essentially we don’t count the reasons we default to allowing as “reasons [proper] to allow X”.Another way to phrase it in the
allowfunction analogy is, “don’t require that the user provide good reasons to allow a thing if there are none to forbid it”.I mean, just go back to the context of the original comment:
A commenter says, “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software”, and the comment under discussion responds, “I disagree with the notion of “There’s no good reason to allow…” That’s not the way the law should work in a free society. Things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.”
He’s simply expressing a philosophical point that rather than things being legal because the law allows them, things are illegal because the law forbids them, and that’s how it should be (in a free society).
Anything that a legal system doesn’t explicitly forbid (with laws) or allow is implicitly allowed by a catch-all law that allows things by default (whether it’s written anywhere or not).
I honestly don’t get what’s so difficult to understand about that or how it’s tautological.
I don’t think they are necessarily equivalent, but I think the “unless” is confusing things.
here is a rough derivation:
things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them
X should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid X
if not (there are good reasons to forbid X) then (X should be allowed)
if there are no good reasons to forbid X, then X should not be forbidden
if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden.
wouldn’t you agree that the last statement is a truism or a tautology? if you take issue with any of the steps, refer to your statement that “you’re being way too literal, which is not how human language works.”
I almost included “the world is not a .vimrc file” at the end of my last comment because obviously I know what a default is in that context. I’m sorry that you wrote all that but analogizing to a software system doesn’t help me understand what being or allowed or forbidden “by default” would mean in the context of a company trying to do something in the real world. has the default case ever been reached? has it ever not been reached?
I don’t think either comment was specifically referring to the law, but this is true even in totalitarian societies. no legal system attempts to enumerate everything that is allowed.
My original comment with the code sample was even longer at first, and I actually ripped this segment out:
So it looks like I’m on the right track.
A truism, yes, a tautology, no.
Sure, sure, but the original commenter was making a point that it definitely shouldn’t be this way in a free society. I don’t disagree that even totalitarian systems don’t attempt to enumerate what’s allowed instead of enumerating what’s disallowed.
No, the context is not merely a company trying to do something in the real world. It’s a discussion on whether the EU should force Apple to open up its iOS app store.
Yes, in law, the default case gets reached all the time, and non-default cases get reached all the time. (If you’re gonna read that overly literal, too, I should clarify that by, “all the time”, I don’t mean that all cases reach both the default and non-default handlers, I mean that at any given point in time, there’s people doing things that the law implicitly allows (the default) and also people doing things that the law does not allow (non-default).)
Within that context (of the discussion on whether the EU should force Apple to open up its iOS app store), a commenter says:
The implication one can pick up from that, whether they intended it to be read that way or not, is a “therefore, the EU should forbid Apple from selling its locked down platform [within its jurisdiction]”.
Our original commenter is responding to that and saying:
In other words: no, you can’t just imply “it should be prohibited because there’s no good reason to allow it”. The first commenter is implying a rule of, “things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them”, and our original commenter is responding, no, “things should be allowed unless there good reasons to forbid them”, which is an oppositional axiom.
You can say the latter is a truism (in the sense that it’s axiomatic, not tautological), but it still has to be said when the first commenter’s statement is adopting the opposite axiom as a premise. Sometimes, things that seem obvious have to be restated.
The point is just that it’s not on anyone to provide a good reason why Apple should be allowed to sell their locked down platform.
The first burden is on those wanting to prohibit it to provide a justification for why it should be prohibited, and if they can’t give any, then it should just be permitted by default for whatever good reasons we default to permitting things, regardless of whether anyone can provide the EU a good reason to specifically permit this thing (that are separate from those good reasons we’ve adopted permitting as the default).
Sure, I understand that there are many reasons people will give that will be the background of the discussion, but the statement, “there’s no good reason to allow […], therefore we should forbid it” should never even enter as part of the discussion.
If you do bring that in, know that you’re challenging the axiom that things should be permitted by default, in which case you can’t just dump it in a conversation as if it’s already known/accepted/assumed that prohibition is the default.
So you definitely understood that the context of the discussion was about law, so I’m still struggling to understand how you didn’t understand the simple point that the commenter was making without turning it into a tautology.
so you agree that the last statement is a truism, but you apparently don’t agree that the first statement is a truism because the rest of your comment is trying to derive some non-obvious meaning from it. at which step in the derivation would you say it starts being a truism?
for what it’s worth, the current paywalled version of the OED includes this in its definitions of “tautology”: “An argument, explanation, or definition that merely restates in different words the very thing which is to be explained, shown, or defined.”
by the nature of how human language works, and the pointlessness of being “too literal,” I don’t know if it’s useful to keep arguing over the difference between truism and tautology and whether the statement is a good enough match for the definition. I think you understand what I meant.
I assume you are saying “no” because you disagree that the comments in question extend beyond matters of law. well consider the phrase “that practice deserves to get shut down.” I think extralegal means such as protest, public denunciation, etc. are well within the scope of that idea, at least in the context of the comment.
so is there ever a case where someone is forbidden from doing something by default?
more or less. a more precise reading would be that the EU should allow plaintiffs to sue in such cases! [INFO HAZARD]
and I think both of those axioms are truisms and tautologies in the everyday sense of the words.
sometimes indeed.
how about this: “there’s no good reason to allow killing someone just because they trespassed on your property.”
then someone responds: “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them.”
do you think the first speaker should be expected to preemptively state their reasons for why killing should be prohibited? are they implying that things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them?
so does that apply to the above?
so the first speaker in my example is “challenging the axiom that things should be permitted by default”????????
the literature on people’s rights extends beyond matters of law.
No, I agree that the first statement in the derivation list is also a truism, I don’t agree that it’s a tautology.
I still don’t see the repetition in, “if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden”, unless you want to say “should X” is actually identical to, rather than what naturally follows from, “good reason to X”.
But even then, that would make the statement “should not X” identical to “good reason to not X”, rather than identical to “no good reason to X”
So again, I don’t think it was a tautology, I think it was an axiomatic truth that was being implicitly challenged and needed to be made explicit so that the discussion could continue with everyone understanding where they each stand.
Even if the implicit challenge was a misreading, the first commenter could just respond, “I think you misunderstood me, I’m not challenging that axiom”.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the meaning of “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” is “we should permit things by default”.
Just like it’s obvious that when a friend says, “whatever happens happens”, he means, based on the context, “let’s not worry too much about things we can’t control or prepare for”, or “we don’t really have much to lose, let’s just go for it and if we lose our investment, it’s no big deal”, or whatever.
No problem with that definition, it’s pretty much what we already agreed on earlier in the discussion. I even gave the example of the three-sided triangle.
I’m happy to skip debating the definition of those two words, you just tell me what you meant by it, because I’m not sure I do understand, still.
If you were using tautology to mean “truism”, then sure, the statement was a tautology, but if you were using it with a definition like this in mind, then no, it wasn’t a tautology (and if you think this definition applies to “truism” as well, then no, it’s not a truism either).
Just let me know which one you meant by it, I’m not interested in debating the definitions of words except to understand a third-party’s usage; between us, I’m happy to use the term tautology to mean axiom if you like.
The comment’s immediate context was law, so that’s the safest meaning we can safely glean from it. The parent said:
The comment quoted the “sounds bogus to me” and his comment was a response to that. In other words, he’s clearly intending his rule of “no good reason to allow it, [so don’t allow it]” to apply in the legal sense and agreeing with the litigators.
He may also intend his opinion to apply extra-legally, or even illegally, but we can’t assume that.
That said, it wouldn’t make much sense that he’s advocating for prohibiting Apple from that action using the full force of the law, but not by boycotting Apple, for example. So I’m happy to extend it to extra-legal means, but he certainly meant it in the legal sense.
I would also say that the rule of allowing others to do as they wish unless there are good reasons to forbid it also applies extra-legally, so the objection still works.
In law? Nothing pops to mind.
A charitable interpretation of the first statement there would be, “someone trespassing on your property isn’t a good reason to kill them”.
The good reasons we don’t kill trespassers are the same good reasons we don’t kill people in general.
The disagreement that person would be having is whether there are or aren’t good reasons to kill trespassers in particular (or, put another way, whether trespassing is a good reason, and the reasons it’s a good reason, etc. however far you wanna go).
They’d almost certainly both agree that there are good reasons not to kill in general. So he’s presumably saying, “someone trespassing isn’t a good reason to kill them” to someone who he knows or suspects disagrees, to make explicit where he stands.
If someone said, “there’s no good reason to allow killing someone” full stop, in the context of responding to someone saying “it’s bogus” that someone is being charged for killing — with the obvious context that he’s saying killing people should just be allowed, not that the charged is innocent — I’d say they were doing a severely poor job of arguing that we shouldn’t kill people.
The reason we don’t allow killing people is not because we lack good reason to allow it.
Yes.
See above.
Yes, but this conversation was about legal proceedings.
I’m happy to extend it beyond law, because in this instance, I think if he has this stance for law, by greater reason, he’d have it for extra-legal ways of prohibiting something which are generally less severe prohibition.
I only mean to point out that he has this stance even as far as the law; I wanted to make it explicit that his stance includes legal means, not to imply that it excludes extra-legal means.
I think it’s fair for me to ask that you clearly and directly answer the question I asked in bold. without that I don’t feel motivated to invest time in crafting a response to all that text. okay?
It depends on the context.
If the context is that they’re responding to someone who simply doesn’t agree that killing in the general case should be prohibited, and they’re aware of this (or aware that it’s a reasonable possibility), then I’d say yes, they are implying that things should be forbidden unless there are good reasons to allow them.
My “no” answer is assuming a normal scenario, where the disagreement they’re having is specifically about whether trespassing is a good reason, and the context makes that obvious, because I don’t know anyone who agrees that killing in the general case should be allowed.
Literally speaking, that’s what they’re implying either way, but with some charity in the right context, I can see that it’s unintentional, and what they really mean is, “someone trespassing on your property isn’t a good reason to overturn the established, agreed upon rule against killing them, which we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit”.
Maybe the conversation in a normal scenario goes something like this:
Their intention becomes clear because they themselves are bringing up a reason that others might appeal to as an alleged good reason to kill someone, and the action being considered for prohibition is already almost-universally agreed upon to be something that should be prohibited in the general case.
Neither of those considerations apply to this thread.
we made it! continuing from here…
and yet you don’t think a reasonable, charitable interpretation of “there’s no good reason to allow any locked platform that doesn’t allow users to re-purpose them by running their own software” could be “we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit such closed platforms and there’s no reason to allow it that outweighs the reasons to prohibit it”?
instead you think the only reasonable interpretation is one that implies “things should be forbidden by default,” something that has never happened and that you couldn’t even speculate on what being forbidden by default would look like???
I could extend that charity now, especially if the original author clarified that’s what they meant.
But secondly — yes, secondly, I’ll get to the firstly secondly, in a second — even with that interpretation, it was still relevant to explicitly assert the truism, because if the implication of the first interpretation is that “things should be forbidden by default”, then the implication of the second interpretation is that, “it’s already settled that we agree there are good reasons monopolistic locked platforms shouldn’t be allowed”.
Which I hope also addresses your point that:
Besides the fact that it’s not unusual for people to hold a belief the logical conclusions of which are insane and they’d never agree to, but they don’t see how that is the logical conclusion, and when it is shown to them, they abandon the belief.
And firstly, that interpretation doesn’t jump out as even a possibility that we could charitably select above other, less charitable interpretations, given the context of the discussion up to that point.
In your example, the comment isn’t “there are no good reasons to allow X”, it’s “there are no good reasons to allow X just because Y”, set in a context where no one argues that X in the general case should be permissible.
Two differences, one in the background context, and one in the wording, but it leads the interpreter’s mind elsewhere, and things that might have required reading the commenter’s mind in this thread become things we can assume for charity’s sake in your disanalogous example.
In your example, it’s obvious that the discussion rests on the premise that everybody agrees killing should not be permitted in the general case and we have various reasons that people accept this, and trespassing has specifically been brought up, so the point under contention is clearly whether trespassing is a good enough reason to overturn the reasons for not killing someone.
In this thread, it’s not obvious at all that people all agree that locked monopolistic platforms, for example, should be permitted or not, so if a commenter says, “there are no good reasons to allow locked monopolistic platforms”, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “things should be permitted by default”;
it’s essentially implying “you tell us why we should prohibit this [so we can debate the merits of your case]; we’re not going to just assume that it’s already been settled that it should be prohibited and we’re talking about hearing good, novel reasons to allow it that outweigh the reasons to prohibit it”.
That’s not even the charitable reading of the response to me, it’s the obvious interpretation that jumps out to me. I don’t find your less charitable version an even tenable reading.
None of this makes the response a tautology, though. I’m still unclear whether you’re saying it’s a truism or a tautology or both, and what definition of both of these terms you’re using.
As I said, I’m happy to just use your definition without debate and tell you whether it’s I think a tautology under a specific definition, but I’ll of course maintain that if you’re using tautology to mean truism or axiom, then you’re wrong and this whole discussion could have been avoided by using the term tautology correctly.
(And even if I charitably take your usage to mean “truism”, then it still wouldn’t work because, as I said above, the truism was, in this context, relevant to explicitly assert.)
I understand very little of what you’ve written, and the parts that I understand I completely disagree with.
then wouldn’t that also apply to the castle doctrine example, if “literally speaking, that’s what they’re implying either way”?
you said that it could be interpreted to mean “things should be forbidden by default.” if the second interpretation is “we have all sorts of reasons to prohibit such closed platforms and there’s no reason to allow it that outweighs the reasons to prohibit it,” that does not imply that “it’s already settled that we agree…” – it’s dumbfounding to read this.
As I said, your interpretation doesn’t jump out as even a possibility (to me) that we could charitably select above other, less charitable interpretations, given the context of the discussion up to that point and the exact phrasing.
In my castle doctrine example, given the addition of the “just because they’re trespassing”, it’s obvious that the discussion is not about killing in the general case, because I can easily interpret the disagreement as being on reasons to overturn the prohibition of killing in the case of trespassers.
In this case, they didn’t say, “there’s no good reason to allow locked platforms just because there are other alternatives”, they said, “there’s no good reason to allow any [their emphasis] locked platform that doesn’t allow users to […]”.
The more charitable interpretation just doesn’t pop out at me as easily. And that doesn’t faze me like, “no, surely he couldn’t have meant that”, because I’d probably subconsciously just chalk it down to a brain fart on their part, and they just needed a reminder of the foundational rule.
I’m saying I can accept that someone could mean “there’s no good reason to allow it” as a shorthand for “there are no good reasons to allow it that outweigh the reasons for prohibiting it”. But they’re responding to a comment that called the whole thing “bogus” because of the diversity of choice,
implying that there’s no good reason to prohibit a locked platform at least in this case,
yet they completely ignored that to shift the burden onto the other side to bring up good reasons to allow it, as if the burden is on the people who think it should be allowed, which, as far as I can see, would only be the case if either:
I’m happy to hear a third option, but as far as I can see, either it’s a settled matter and so the burden is on the pro-allowance side, or it’s not a settled matter and the person who responded to that comment to shift the burden back to the pro-prohibition side by pointing out, “things should be allowed unless there are good reasons to forbid them” was completely in the right.
You can’t have your cake and eat it. Again, this wouldn’t faze me, I’d chalk it down to a brain fart, which is why the reminder of the basic rule seemed natural to me.
At this point, I’ve explained and over-explained why I interpreted things the way I did. If you’re gonna respond that you’re dumbfounded again, I can’t really do anything more — and I’m tired of having to keep asking you about where you stand on the tautology thing and what definition you want to use or anything about that — so let’s just end it here.
they needed a reminder of the foundational rule which has always applied and could never not apply even hypothetically… okay buddy.
well if you’re still curious, I think the OED definition I gave is just fine: “An argument, explanation, or definition that merely restates in different words the very thing which is to be explained, shown, or defined.”
I thought the original statement was roughly equivalent to “if there are no good reasons to forbid something, then it should not be forbidden.” by the standards of everyday speech, I think “there are no good reasons to forbid X” is a mere restatement of “X should not be forbidden.” In contrast to a mere “reason,” a “good reason” can be understood as one that overrides the reasons for the contrary proposition.
best of luck to you.
Yeah, that’s what a brain fart is. You can end up saying things that lead to insane conclusions and all you need is a that pointed out to you to realise you messed up in your train of thought somewhere.
And if they didn’t mean it that way, then they simply misspoke, and again, it’s useful to clarify the implication of their words so they can rephrase.
I understood “good reason” as one which isn’t fallacious or based on false premises or otherwise weak. So you can have a good reason that’s still outweighed by better reasons to do the opposite.
But let’s take your understanding.
Then we can go back to the understanding of the foundational reasons to allow things by default not being part of the set of reasons being referred to in the statement, “if there are no reasons to forbid something that aren’t outweighed by reasons to allow it, then it should be allowed”, so that it can be understood as, “things should be allowed by default”.
Such an interpretation would charitably remove the tautology at the cost of implying that the person is themselves being uncharitable to the person they’re responding to, by implying that they don’t know, or at least haven’t considered in their prior statement, that the burden is on them to give reasons to forbid that specific thing.
I still think the most charitable way to interpret the whole conversation is like:
A: “This is bogus, there’s plenty of competition.” B: “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platforms.” C: “[Why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it, since] things should be allowed by default.”
If we apply your charity to B, we can even say:
A: “This is bogus, there’s plenty of competition.” B: “There’s no good reason to allow any locked platforms.” C: “[Why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it, since] things should be allowed by default [and the reasons given for prohibiting locked platforms, like user choice, don’t apply].”
A response like, “why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid it” is susceptible to an objection like, “why are you shifting the burden to the person who asked first for reasons to allow it? are you admitting there’s no good reason to allow it?”;
a response like, “the reasons given for prohibiting locked platforms don’t apply here” is susceptible to a response like, “they never gave any reasons”.
Given how easy it is to encounter people online who think waaay differently from yourself, you can’t blame them for writing defensively by bringing it back to basics, but you’ll never please everyone, I guess.
At the end of this, I understand how you could have reasonably interpreted it as a tautology.
I hope you can also understand how I could have reasonably interpreted the comment that was itself responding to as an incorrectly placed burden of ‘proof’ to the point that it needed to be pointed out (which people do in discussion and debate all the time).
If we both understand each other, there’s not much reason to keep arguing the point unless you have anything new to add.
useful for what? I think you have to be willfully obtuse to think that they actually meant it in a way that implies the insane conclusion you suggested. if you don’t think that, we can agree to disagree, but really ask yourself if you’re being honest with yourself.
so I don’t see the value in “giving them the opportunity to rephrase.” if the goal is to address the topic of conversation, it can only derail, an in this case the derailment came immediately after the tautology in the very same comment.
that’s also a fine interpretation. two people can have different interpretations without either being incorrect.
I think this interpretation is at least as fair:
A: this is bogus, there’s plenty of competition
B: why don’t you tell us the reasons to forbid suing on these grounds, since we know the EU parliament decided that the type of competition that exists is not a sufficient reason?
etc.
I agree that there was some rhetorical shifting of the burden of proof on both sides, but there was never agreement on who had the burden of proof to begin with. attempting to rhetorically shift the burden of proof back using a tautology is fair game, but so is pointing out that it’s a tautology. at least the previous comment, not being tautologous, meaningfully advanced the discussion… I consider bringing up a misreading of john locke to be a derailment and not meaningfully adding to the discussion, but maybe that’s just me.
nice to see some convergence in a discussion for once.
To help them realise they misspoke.
Not really. People shift the burden of proof in obscene ways all the time, it’s an easy trap to fall into if you’re being intellectually lazy, or are even just too lazy to type or express yourself fully on a complex topic, looking for quick, easy putdowns to say to put the matter to bed.
I think it’d be insane if I believed they actually believed the implication, but I just don’t find it unusual for people to have beliefs that have extreme implications without noticing it; syllogistic reasoning is hard for most humans.
It’s an opportunity for them to clarify your misunderstanding, giving you the more charitable interpretation that you failed to glean from the original statement.
People routinely say things that have insane implications. I’ve already explained why it doesn’t faze me, but to add some thoughts here:
Even if I didn’t believe they meant it that way, how else is someone meant to respond to them shifting the burden of proof onto the opposition by saying, “no good reason to allow this”, except by saying, “hold on, let’s start the conversation from the start, the burden is on you to show why it should be forbidden”?
I can say that without believing that they truly mean those words but I make it clear that the only interpretation that’s coming to mind is one where their words imply insane conclusion X, and then they can just clarify.
If they’d dug their heels in and explicitly said, “no, things shouldn’t be allowed by default”, then I might start thinking, “what the hell, surely they can’t mean that? I must be misunderstanding”,
but before that point, you don’t really consciously question it, you might just think they misspoke, or you misunderstood, or they don’t realise the implication of their shifting of the burden of proof and would backtrack if shown it.
You might also assume it was just a moment of intellectual and/or keyboard laziness, and your job is to put up that objection that the burden of proof is on them, so nobody’s sitting there thinking the pro-prohibition arguments are already settled and agreed on.
I can understand why someone might be insulted, thinking, “what the hell, do they really think I don’t know that? Do they think I’m literally more extreme than every totalitarian state to ever exist?”, but that’s not necessarily the case. You’re just responding to and/or pointing out the implications of their words from the most charitable interpretation that comes to mind, even if it’s insane, and not really thinking anything of it, expecting that they’ll either realise their mistake or point out yours.
This is all happening subconsciously, so you might not even really register how insane your interpretation of their words’ implications (not the words themselves) sounds, but even if you do, as I said, you’d just chalk it down to them not realising the implications due to laziness, misspeaking, or not fully thinking through their belief to its logical conclusion (or you incorrectly attributing an implication that doesn’t exist and they’ll demonstrate your mistake).
I think moments like that pass by in many conversations, especially on contentious topics.
Ehh, I’d wonder why B didn’t just make their disagreement explicit about the EU parliament deciding that the type of competition that exists is not a sufficient reason, since A seems to be unaware of that.
Let’s use truism, since we agree that it’s at least a truism under both our initial interpretations, but only a tautology under your interpretation (and even then, I’m a bit iffy on whether it’s a tautology even under that interpretation, but I can see how it can be considered one).
I agree with “attempting to rhetorically shift the burden of proof back using a
tautologytruism is fair game”.Anyway, I don’t deny it’s fair game to point out it’s a tautology if you think so. It’s just also fair game to question why you think it’s a tautology, and you explained, and now I get it :).
Agreeing on truism, not necessarily tautology, I do think reiterating a truism can meaningfully advance the discussion; it’s not about the truism itself, it’s about what’s being implied by bringing it up (in the moment that you do): “let’s go back to the basics of the topic”.
I’m not sure where John Locke comes into this, I’m not versed enough with his works to judge if it’s a misreading, but I thought we both agreed that even the most totalitarian state doesn’t forbid things by default? Or am I misunderstanding what part of the discussion you’re referring to here?
but if somebody says “I see no reason to allow killing people,” they don’t deserve the benefit of your generous help?
this is getting really tiresome and you are committing inconsistencies that suggest you aren’t giving due consideration to what has already been said. for example you previously said you were happy to use “tautology” according to my preferred usage; now you are insisting on “truism.” I can address your points if you keep them to a paragraph or two, but otherwise it’s really not worth the time at this point. sorry.
I think this will just be treading well-worn ground.
By that, I just meant that I’m happy to not debate what the term means. In other words, I was happy to reinterpret your prior comments where you use “tautology” and read all instances as “truism” to address you on the substance.
Interpreting your prior comments with that definition and not arguing over semantics doesn’t mean I have to use the word.
I suggested we use “truism” because we both agree on its definition. I was trying, for common ground, to agree with you, but didn’t want to use the word myself, as I wanted to be ultra-clear what I was agreeing to, and I didn’t want my words to be taken out of context, even accidentally.
We’re already having enough trouble understanding each other, but looks like my attempt to be clearer just resulted in the opposite. I see that switching out “tautology” for “truism” may have insinuated that I interpreted you to not already have meant “truism” by “tautology” in that sentence; my bad, that wasn’t my intent.
I also used the distinction, which I didn’t anticipate earlier in this thread; for example, when I say, “I don’t deny it’s fair game to point out it’s a tautology”, because I specifically meant tautology there w/ my original definition (though, thinking about it now, both are probably fair game, really).
I should have clarified that I was using it with my original definition at that point. I didn’t realise in the moment how confusing I was being and just thoughtlessly used both words to signify a distinction.
Which was doubly bad, because I was just making a separate point, because you weren’t even using tautology in that sense when you said, “it’s fair game to point out it’s a tautology”; I missed that because, as I was proof-reading, I saw my sentence, “I don’t deny it’s fair game to point out it’s a truism”, and wanting to specifically mean “tautology”, I ‘corrected’ that sentence, forgetting it was a response to you using the word.
It’s been a long thread.
It’s hard to stick to one paragraph when there’s so much at contention every reply and, again, I’m trying to be as clear as possible.
Also, don’t apologise, I think we’ve both put more than enough time into this.
compare this to:
was it a mistake for me to assume that if you were happy to use “tautology” to mean “axiom,” you would be happy to use it in the sense that prompted you to say “I understand how you could have reasonably interpreted it as a tautology”? or am I on to something about you being inconsistent after such a long thread?
you can strive for both clarity and succinctness while keeping to the most important points. if I addressed everything in contention in your comments, we would have an exponential explosion in comment length.
I wasn’t entirely sure what you were saying here, but I went back and checked that, “I understand how […]” quote to look at the context.
I wrote that in response to:
In other words, the use of tautology here is not “truism”, but my original definition of restating in different words, despite this part of the conversation happening pretty soon after I’d said, “let me know which one you want to use”.
In fact, you say as much right before:
That’d probably explain why I started using “tautology” as “restating”. Because after I kept pestering you for which definition you want to use, you stuck with the OED definition of “restat[ing]” and used the word with that definition.
That might also explain why I continued to use the two words in distinct ways, and reworded (with strikethrough) your use of “tautology” to “truism” in the specific sentences where I suspected you were reverting to using it as such, to be clear that I interpreted it that way, or wanted to agree or disagree on the sentence as interpreted in that way.
As I said, I didn’t anticipate the need to use both words with their distinct meanings, instead of as synonyms, when I offered to interpret your words how you mean them without debating semantics.
Beyond that, I gave multiple reasons why I started to use tautology with my original definition again. Looks like I should add to the list: I asked you which definition to use, and you chose the OED one to the list. I had forgotten that, and it seems you had, too.
Probably we’ve both been inconsistent after such a long thread, at the very least in how we’ve expressed our points. It feels like you’re trying to reach for a gotcha instead of constructively trying to understand what I meant at various points.
I said earlier, “I should have clarified that I was using it with my original definition at that point”. I stand by that.
However, I see now that when I offered to let you choose a definition, you went with the OED one. So, I think you should take back your saying, “you previously said you were happy to use “tautology” according to my preferred usage; now you are insisting on “truism.””.
I found myself considering if you were using it to mean “truism” again, despite saying to use the OED definition, so I chose to be explicit and just use “truism” when I meant that or suspected you meant that.
Honestly, we should have probably just chose a third word or set of words to express ourselves for “tautology” and “truism”. I used “axiom” a few times to replace what I mean by “truism”.
This whole thread has felt like an inquisition.
My words have dumbfounded you, exasperated you, provoked snark from you, and I’ve tried my best to engage with everything I could in good faith, admit where I made mistakes, and try to find common ground.
In response, it feels like, despite you calling for charitable interpretation, all you’ve done is interpret my words in the least charitable but still plausible way, trying to catch me out on contradictions (that could be resolved with some charity).
So I think I can be forgiven for overexplaining myself.
thanks; looks like I was wrong
you don’t owe me anything and there’s nothing to forgive. I just think you could benefit from learning to focus on what’s important and to express yourself more clearly and succinctly.
it seems that we have largely resolved the question that started this thread. I’m not sure there’s much reason to continue. you seemed interested in why I thought you contradicted yourself, and I am still not convinced by your defense – my honest impression is that you are incapable of admitting a mistake, a very unfortunate condition, so I thought that showing it to you clearly might help. but if you aren’t enjoying the “inquisition” then I won’t keep pushing. and if you have admitted a mistake in this thread I wouldn’t mind seeing where so I can account for why I would have missed it. otherwise good luck.
I admitted several mistakes in this thread, AFAICT you admitted none.
At least here:
and here:
Mobile phones are important as their own category, laptops don’t replace them.
In the mobile market in the EU there is a strong Apple + Google duopoly. Apple does whatever they want, and Google has no incentive to be any better, because there’s no third mass-market option that could threaten their business.
Android is also becoming increasingly more closed. Google uses access to the PlayStore and its proprietary Android libraries (required by lots of apps) as a way to control Android vendors, and prevent them from removing Google’s self-promotion and control from Android.
This isn’t a healthy competitive market. It’s two landlords who can dictate any terms they want.
The EU is going after Apple at the behest of companies like Spotify and Epic.
This is a fight between large companies and we have to hope that we don’t get trampled in the process.
This is not incorrect, but imprecise…
…and this is incorrect. The actual situation is as follows: The European Commission has formally asserted that Apple is a “gatekeeper” under Art. 3 DMA on 2023-09-06. Art. 3(1) DMA gives the criteria when a “gatekeeper” is to be assumed. Art. 3(4) DMA mandates the Commission to designate a company as a “gatekeeper” ex officio and does not depend on a request from a private party. The formal designation as a “gatekeeper” by the Commission causes certain duties of interoperability for the designated which are laid out in other articles of the DMA.
About a year later, the Commission has started a proceedings against Apple due to violation of its gatekeeper responsibilities under the DMA as per Art. 8(2) DMA This article, again, allows the Commission to act ex officio without a preceeding private request. This latter proceedings does not yet seem to have come to a conclusive decision. Ultimately, this second proceedings may lead to a fine against Apple (Artt. 29, 30 DMA).
From the talk’s description – I have not watched the talk myself – I conclude that Apple is challenging the first decision – the designation as a gatekeeper under Art. 3 DMA by the Commission – in court now. That decision of the Commission is formally binding against a specific private company (Apple) and can as such be brought directly before the European Courts as per Art. 263(4) TFEU. As per Art. 256(1)(1) TFEU, it is to be brought before the European Court of the first instance, which is not – as the headline implies – “the EU’s highest court”, but rather, well, the court of the first instance. Against this court’s decision it is possible to appeal as per Art. 256(1)(2) TFEU to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which then is the “highest EU court” for this case as it is not possible to further contest its decision.
If the courts decide in favour of Apple, the Commission’s designation of Apple as a “gatekeeper” is void and Apple does not have to comply with the DMA at all, making the aforementioned second proceedings irrelevant.
While to my knowledge the Commission has not publically said that it received requests by Epic or other companies to act against Apple, it did publically request feedback during the aforementioned proceedings and it is only likely that Epic and others have submitted such feedback. German media outlets did report about complaints by Epic and other companies but I was unable to find an official acknowledgement of the Commission of this.
In any case, Epic and other companies are not direct parties to the lawsuit at hand, and neither is the FSFE. It is a lawsuit between Apple the European Commission in the first place, and any other people are only involved on a secondary level, which may include – as it seems to be the case with the FSFE – some special privilegues, which probably mostly amount to the ability to testify in some way or another. I’m not firm enough in CJEU process law to answer this question in detail. As is however widely known, CJEU process law does not include a possibility to submit amicus curiae briefs, thus the FSFE’s formal secondary involvement probably is intended to substitute that.
Here’s a simple one: without the DMA, you cannot run actual Chrome or Firefox on iOS. They’re just skins on top of Safari’s WebKit.
Oh, want to run an emulator on iOS? That was banned by their Store Guidelines. These are software blocks that artificially limit what you can run on hardware you’re supposed to own.
I have an old iPod I can’t really use anymore, because the iTunes Store APIs have changed, and it can’t talk to Apple anymore.
Here’s a possible future we avoided: without anti-competitive legislation, we might all still be stuck supporting Internet Explorer. The web exploded once that monopolistic lever was cut.
If it weren’t for being stuck in Apple’s castle, an iPhone would be on the cards, as the hardware is generally better than the rest. But then I’m stuck with the artificial limitations Apple enforce, that aren’t a function of the hardware. Heck, even Apple laptops pre-ARM were more functional running Windows than macOS because of the way they lock down hardware with their software. I still use Windows on my old MacBook Air because (for me), it’s actually better. I’d love to be able to do similar with their phones.
In other words, don’t enforce the law?
Apple doesn’t have to do business in the EU. Pick another market.
I’ve read through the answers to my question (and the currently highest rated comment). Thank you. None of them are satisfactory to me.
To me the best out come for an economy is that people can vote with their wallets. Government trying to micromanage product design is not going to be a good thing. All it does is it encourages deep pockets (the corporations) to become entangled even deeper with politics and establish stronger anti-competitive regulations.
The only think I would want from my government is to ensure that the current deep pockets don’t stifle innovation. So, if a small company was offering a platform as the people here seem to want, all I would want is regulation to see that such companies are not crushed by anything other than lack of demand.
There are actually efforts to build such open phones. Pine phone was one I think. A much more fruitful question is to ask, why is it not more successful. Attacking the current leader in innovation is not a a productive long term strategy.
Companies are already using their deep pockets. That’s precisely why the people need the government to step in for them instead.
Relating to open projects, the market is not a level playing field. There’s very strong network effects: apps people need for their daily life are not functional outside the two major OSes. Sometimes intentionally like most bank apps. My bank even blocks my desktop browser because it’s hardened!
Projects like the Pinephone are great but it’s not even been the year of the Linux desktop yet, so Linux mobile won’t be close to usable for most people any time soon.
Right now the most realistic way of giving more autonomy to users is by opening those 2 walled gardens, and that requires government intervention because it’s contrary to the companies’ incentives.
The US is highly criticised for it’s two-party system, where a vote has little value outside of voting for the two monopolies. Would a two-corporation software ecosystem be a fair system for voting with your wallet? There has to be a protection of the currently fairly open ecosystem, so that it can’t degrade into a closed ecosystem.
Do people really want an open ecosystem? Because if they do, they can just buy a Pinephone. Why don’t they? That is the most interesting question.
I’m my neck of the woods, WhatsApp decides which mobile operating systems are viable. Some people can live without WhatsApp, but for many it’s a huge pain. The DMA’s term of gatekeeper fits like a glove perfectly.
I doubt that WhatsApp interop will suffice to move the needle significantly, but it’s certainly a huge blocker in increasing ecosystem diversity.
I like this point. My interpretation of your statement:
I conclude that all most people want is a phone that runs WhatsApp. At least in the US there are thousands of choices. Esoteric arguments over a third OS outside of Apple and Android are exactly that: esoteric.
Those “thousands of choices” are all Android devices, and Google controls the terms under which an OEM is allowed to ship it. The power structures under consideration are based on OS and app marketplace vendor, of which there are only two. So it’s hardly an “esoteric argument” to say your choices are fundamentally limited.
You can see this when you go to any website that also offers an app - they show you two options for download: Android and Google. If there were viable alternatives, app makers would target them. At this point it’s like Microsoft’s stranglehold on personal computing in the nineties: it’s hard for anyone to break through because there’s such a strong monopoly in place (or, in this case, a duopoly). At least back then you could dual boot.
You missed the ditty about people not wanting a quarter-inch drill, but wanting quarter-inch holes.
People want a communications network. I have never met anyone who wanted WhatsApp, they wanted to communicate.
I cannot think of many things which are as dependent on network effects as instant messaging.
The WhatsApp monopoly in my country stifles innovation by raising the barrier to entry massively. If I want to make a popular mobile operating system I must either convince WhatsApp to release their app for my phone before it has sufficient market share to matter to them or be so irrealistically good that people will switch and force people using Android/iOS to install a new instant messaging app. You likely thing this is doable, in practice, historically, very few of these things have happened.
Unfortunately, for-profit companies are only aligned with their profits. Sometimes this aligns with customer benefit, but when they don’t align, companies have chosen to screw with customers to make money nearly every time.
Hence, the EU intervening and forcing WhatsApp to be interoperable IMHO is likely going to result in a benefit for the customers. However, so many actions like those are needed to move the needle significantly…
Some of this is even a taxpayer-funded problem. I stopped paying the TV License Fee (which funds the BBC) almost 20 years ago. My TV had broken a year earlier so I didn’t need one, but I was happy to support BBC News. Then they launched iPlayer, as a Windows-only service. Later, they explicitly wrote iOS and Android apps. This was tax money being spent on something that locked people into the dominant software platforms. They could have provided an open API and let anyone who wanted their platform to work with iPlayer implement a client, but they didn’t, they made it impossible to stream to anything except a blesses platform.
Ironically (given that Microsoft persuaded them to use Silverlight for the original version to lock people into Windows), this was one of the things that killed Windows Phone in the UK: it was the only phone that you couldn’t watch the BBC on.
Probably because it doesn’t fucking work?
Then why not reply to the comments and explain why they aren’t satisfactory?
Can you unpack that? Don’t companies already have sufficient incentive to oppose competition in whatever ways they can?
It’s clear you want things that other people don’t want, and that’s fine. But your last sentence seems completely fatuous. If people want to oppose a tyranny that is innovating in the commoditization of human interaction, attacking them may very well be productive toward that goal.