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Comment by brainwad | Hacker News Reader

> So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately start loading apps

I'm sorry, I thought I owned the phone I bought, and had a right to decide what software I want on it whenever I want.

It's still surprising to me how fast we lost ownership norms, and most seem satisfied with renting the right to be a sort of peasant.

Unless you own your own cell carrier and built towers across your country, you can’t own a phone.

Sure you can, the same way you can own a lamp without owning the power plant.

If you don't lay down your own roads you can't own a bike.

About that... you might be interested that private property ownership in general is the result of similar kinds of onerous and exploitative processes. Anthropologists and historians have done a bunch of research on this for a while, and one of the interesting narrative texts about this is Engels'

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (based on Lewis Herny Morgan's work) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-fami...

I agree wholeheartedly, but you can already unlock and root your phone and install whatever you want. This is not that battle. Mind you, I don't like either of these, but they're very different in nature.

And if I want to run the stock OS I paid for, with apps of my choice? It feels like a bait and switch to lock down the OS like this after you've sold the device.

This is the stock OS you paid for. It's beholden to Google and subject to their updates as it always was. You can either flash a different OS entirely, or even break their ability to update it before the change rolls out, if that's what you want. What I think you really want is to pick and choose what updates you get, which I would love too, but that's neither here nor there.

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