It doesn't even have to be censorship of speech.

If you are wrongly charged a significant amount by either Google or Apple and their service is of no help, what would you do?

Most people would weigh the options, then just eat the cost than anger them with a chargeback and lose their email/phone access. That's self-censorship financially too.

What if Google reinstates their old G+ and YouTube real name policy for its accounts. We would protest but give them the proof grudgingly and it can position itself as one of the core part of online ID verification push currently going on.

Google had Don’t be evil motto just between 2000 and 2018. Other companies don’t even try to pretend it. You are owned by them.

„Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.“ - Lord Acton, 1887

But I can't use my Norwegian BankID unless I have an apple store or play store account. This is required for every aspect of society. Heathcare, banking, taxes, driving, using my debit card online.

They removed SMS 2FA options recently, the only non-tech monopoly method is a 2fa codebrick that's getting harder and harder to acquire (there are new ridiculous facial ID and passport scanning requirements, run by a private corporation, in order to get one).

It's garbage and getting worse. And it seems no one cares our entire lives exist at the whim of two US tech monoliths.

You can't install anything without an Apple account. Just tried installing altstore.io to repeat my previous unsuccessful attempt.

Only users based in Brazil, Japan, or the European Union are able to install apps through alternative app distribution. The country or region of your *Apple Account* must be set to one of those countries or regions, and you must physically be located there. [0]

UPDATE: Also tried to install onside.io. No luck. The same popup:

Cannot Install App: You are not eligible to install apps from "onside.io".

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/117767 https://support.apple.com/en-us/118110

> The EU has the alternative App Store option that doesn’t require an Apple account.

I cannot install any iOS software without being logged into my Apple account, not even an alternative app store.

It would be perfect on my older iDevices, but they don't let me log in anymore “because the OS is too old”. And guess what: I cannot update the OS without being logged in. I never logged out of those iDevices, Apple did that from their end.

Wow, I did not know this and -despite its drawbacks, like not being able to install apps from the Apple App store- this seems like a great way to have a powerful dumb-phone.

It's not Linux phones that we need. We already have alternatives, like graphene and other AOSP forks.

We need corporations and governments to stop locking down and gatekeeping vital software to closed ecosystems.

A Linux phone doesn't help me when my government's 2FA system (BankID) only runs on Android and IOS phones and can only be acquired with an app store account.

I don’t want to be too pedantic but Android uses the Linux kernel. Degoogled Android is basically what you want.

Why do you need a Linux phone (as if Android is not a Linux phone), when there is also AOSP. If Google closes it up, it can be forked, but I don't see any fundamental benefit of throwing away decades of development done on AOSP.

That judge may be an outlier today, but we all know tomorrow they could sweep through all accounts and ban everyone that spoke against the regime. We have arrived.

> Governments need to wake up to this insane level of Evil.

I’m not even being cynical — it would probably just increase the amount of government contract cash awarded to them. Control makes governing a lot easier, control is what tech companies have, and to varying degrees, it’s for sale.

As proven by history, it's convenient to have a big well-known external entity to blame as a source of any trouble, but in reality it's orders of magnitude easier to be a digital dissident in the US compared to the EU. And European Commission + European national governments are exactly the ones you should blame first. They are openly proud of how it works, they call it successful digitalization for a positive spin.

> Governments need to wake up to this insane level of Evil

Governments are made up of people. People who have at best median level understanding of the things they are ruling about but great self-interest in following the biggest purse to which they can attach themselves.