I think people confuse the merits of Apple, Google , iOS, iDevices, Android and Android devices with their market practices and policies, both to consumers and consumers suppliers. These are two distinct issues, albeit related in a market.
As far as treating consumers as well as consumer assets as their own products to transact and sell access to, Apple is on par with either Facebook or Google if not worst as its an entirely closed ecosystem. Of course, in my opinion as always.
Apple is effectively monetising devices as well as data (assets), devices that they have sold but indeed do not own, wrapped up in EULAS that consumers agree with in mostly good faith. Same as Facebook, but this one only concerns data.
I believe that these practices, case in case, companies monetizing assets that companies do not own (either sold by them or others), should be regulated in order to protect the the actual owners against abuses.
The argument that Apple and co are simply monetizing their part of the bargain, say their OS license and services, falls apart when the use of such license is preconditioned by the availability of a device, a separate contract, that was not offered within the context of the license and vice versa, a device that was bought by the user so its theirs, that itself already constituted a substantial business transaction.
Ownership of a ”thing” is not just defined by the freely sell the thing, but also by the ability to freely use it for its purpose while respecting both the intelectual and material properties of the suppliers and buyers.
In my opinion, some of these companies practices do not respect that. The discussion has been systematically about customers respecting the supplier ownership, both intelectual and material. It is argued that the device ownership is fully sustained by owners ability to sell and choose something else. A very distorted reasoning over property ownership. Considering that the same entities, not even that offer as a garantee … in certain cases, the owner is even denied the technical means necessary to sell his properties… the case of its licenses over digital assets … music, movies, apps (yes apps)… so on and so forth. They are all at it, yes, Epic too.
The regulators seam not to have the political power to stop this tech corporate attack to citizens property ownership by taking advantage of the elasticity of the digital material. The concept of private property is a fundamental constitutional base of a democracy and it should be balanced between corporations and citizens/consumers/users. Who establish that balance should not be left to the faith of EULAs developed by corporactions with the power to hire an “army” of lawyers acting only in favor of interests of its contractor.
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