They still don’t have backups on iOS which is a deal-breaker for me.

Yeah I’ve opted out every time (a couple times each at three different airports) and haven’t had any issues, the agents I’ve seen knew exactly what to do if someone opts out.

Every airport I’ve gone through that’s doing it has half a dozen signs up as you move through the line telling you that you can opt out by letting them know you want to.

I’ve refused it a few times now and every agent knew exactly what they needed to do.

Yes, the first one matches only 2 more characters while the second matches 1 or more. Also the +? is a lazy quantifier so it will consume as little as possible.

Yeah but also this is only for their EU profit, so it’s really an even higher percentage.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about money they made in other countries when talking about these fines, as if they make 5 billion in profit in country X and get fined 6 billion, they would still have lost money for operating in the country regardless of how much money they made other places. Since they lost money in the country, that fine would be high enough for them to want to fix their law breaking or totally pull out of the country, and so the fine accomplishes its purpose.

I don’t think the server software is open source.

Yeah this is why I don’t use cloudflare, I have my domains on porkbun.

I think that’s mostly driven by regulatory capture and the fact that lobbyists can drive regulation. If our government actually worked for the people, we could actually enforce monopoly laws, and the SEC (or equivalent in countries besides the US) would actually prevent mergers that threaten competition. The government is supposed to prevent this kind of behavior, but they have basically been bought out.

As for how to stop that from happening, I’m not sure. I think it would require at least getting rid of the two party system, because that stifles competition in the governance space. That means that even though there are probably lots of voters who would vote for a real candidate who would break monopolies, there is no such candidate available. But in order for that to work we would have to switch to a different voting method, like ranked-choice (or one of the even more fair ones).

I think a free market in a given sector can encourage innovation. That’s not to say all sectors need innovation, there’s not a lot of innovation to be had in many sectors, like providing water, or housing, and those probably don’t need to be a free market. They could be provided by the government for example.

Yeah this is exactly what free market lunatics on the right don’t understand. Monopoly isn’t a free market. Free markets simply cannot exist without regulation to prevent unfair business practices.

Also any reasonable economist can tell you that the free market does not solve issues like the tragedy of the commons, because negative externalities are not factored in. It is also the government’s job to ‘internalize’ externalities so companies actually see the costs of, for example, polluting our air and water.

TLDR: free market != unregulated market

Yeah, I agree, I think a true free market is basically impossible because there will always be winners and those companies will certainly use their power to stifle competition. Also it is difficult for the consumer to evaluate every product they buy even if there is a number of competitors, so issues like what @Telorand@reddthat.com mentioned (sawdust in food) come up because consumers just don’t have the measurement equipment to check.

I like the free market too, but having a small number of companies control a necessary resource definitely isn’t a free market.

I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.

Oh yeah you’re right, I mixed up what conversation I was in.

See also https://us.7digital.com/; there are a number of places you can buy and download CD-quality music files. I believe iTunes actually lets you download music you buy as normal audio files as well.

Yeah I don’t think DRM-free is really a requirement for most people.

It’s because the people making money off most academic papers are not the authors, rather the journal/conference they likely had to pay to publish in. Textbooks are a different story though.

Why would they pay them, just use the power of the free market and raise the price of electricity (or even just for industrial users like bitcoin miners) when supply is low until they bow out because it’s not profitable and demands matches supply. Weird how the free market is only good when it’s not free, but dominated by monopolists.

I don’t like how OsmAnd limits the number of maps you can download for free, Organic Maps’s donation model is much better in my opinion.