Apple’s filed a patent on a design for a device that won’t let its owner use it unless that person demonstrates that she has complied with an advertiser’s demands by paying attention to an ad and taking some action indicating her dutiful attention.
Google may be no saint and privacy is a problem, but Apple’s attitude to consumers borders on contempt. There should be a split between hardware, applications and data. This is the kind of vertical and horizontal integration that the great 19th and early 20th century anti-trust movements were based on.
So, yes, I like my Mac. No, I do not like iTunes, no matter how clever “Genius” may be.
If governments wanted to do some good they could enforce net neutrality by banning hardware-level integration of applications (the player) and data (the tunes). And, about demanding “dutiful compliance” with an advertiser’s will? To me the inappropriateness of such an approach is self evident and reduces me to spluttering.
Google Android running on HTC hardware with Spotify supplying the tunes is no more free of corporate ploys, but at least demanding that vendors support multiple platforms preserves some minimal choice.
rWorld2 