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Comment by realce | Hacker News Reader

Aggressive lock-in and positioning their conglomerate's holdings to be blocks to conducting normal activity in society via any competitor.

How about I flood your whole city with robotaxi cars and make it cost a nickel a mile, but you must be an X account holder, must use the X app, must pay in X-coin, and must submit to whatever other perverse encapsulation Lord Musk decides to implement. How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites, forcing most connected people to buy from my ISP, must pay in X-coin but it also only costs 20 bucks a month. On and on, it seems pretty transparent to me.

It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future.

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Is he going to make an "X" account required to operate a Tesla? Sort of like what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 11, or Facebook did with the Oculus.

You get in your car to drive to the store, but it demands you makes several public posts about how great the car is before letting you go to the store or exit the car.

Original lore: http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/hu...

> It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future

But in this scenario Twitter is like Vanuatu planning world domination. They have absolutely no leverage to compel anbody to sign up for a Twitter account. Musk would need to spend significanty more money to do any of this, and frankly, I feel like he will spend the coming year being an election provocateur than do anything productive.

Yea but competitors (Apple, Meta, Google, etc.) are better across the board and they would be able to provide alternatives or prevent these activities.

> How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites

Just cherry-picking this one but, but it would get regulated and competitors would come on to the market, and you can also obtain service from traditional providers (ISPs, and mobile providers) like you do today.

Also you can see how well these items work now ala Apple (maybe Google too?). Apple Card, iCloud, iPhone, Car Play, etc. good luck competing with that when people actively hate your products lol. I'm not super worried about this. I'm much more concerned about something like disinformation campaigns on social media or something along those lines than I am any sort of competence with Twitter turning into a dystopian nightmare machine.

Honestly this sounds like it would end up being a net negative.

The US or the EU are not China. People generally don't accept being forced to do things and I wonder about the legality of it all.

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