Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!

Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.

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globular-toast 9 hours ago | parent [-]

A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept and markets like electronics are nowhere near free. Collusion is something that happens in an oligopoly. The fact many markets degenerate into oligopolies and monopolies is why we need government. 30 years ago I feel like people understood this. Now it seems everyone thinks they know what free market means just because they heard the term one time.

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nyeah 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[delayed]

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eimrine 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I like this branch of discussion and I want it to keep growing. What has to happen to make an electronics market free? Is the situation about spyware TV/cars can not be improved in any kind of Libertarian or Anarcho-Capitalist world without the Government? Is bad government worse for the electronics market than absence of any governments?

	▲	rthrfrd 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		All unregulated free market arguments rely on low/no barriers to entry. There are very few markets where this is true in reality.
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	globular-toast 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this. What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry. We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better. Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.