Comment by gbacon
> I do have interest in their being at least some real negotiation between parties signing a contract. > > For pretty much all consumers - there is no negotiation. […]How would this work for products with even a modest number of customers?
Today, Microsoft offers 365 Personal for $9.99 per month. Is it your assertion that Microsoft ought to staff people to field phone calls from prospective customers asking “Mmm iono, $9.99 is a bit much. What can I get for $8.99?”
Perhaps set prices are not the problem. You did specifically mention EULAs. How many attorneys — not just telephone jockeys — would you require Apple or Google to hire to analyze potential redlines and additions to their EULA from every Tom, Dick, and Harry around the world?
Do you limit your criticisms to Apple and Google and, I presume, Microsoft? Are open-source authors guilty of “tyranny of contract” by offering their software free of charge but with take-or-leave terms? What reëducation do these volunteer provocateurs require?
Based on your gripe about limited room for negotiation — and for which you assert, based on no moral framework or premises, that the rightful remedy forcible dismantling of at least certain unfavored vendors — you have tremendous interest in free things, namely other people’s time, attention, and expertise so that you may have someone with whom to haggle over terms or price, perhaps both.
Apple and Google are not the only providers of mobile phones. Microsoft is not the only provider of office software. Competitors with substitutes exist today. You may not like the features available at the price point that you would prefer, but that’s a separate matter. You get what you pay for. If you can deliver a better product that undercuts the existing giants and is profitable, then you have a great disruptor startup idea. Go put your money where your mouth is and await the arrival “certificates of appreciation” by the billion into your bank account.
If you cannot formulate a business plan for everything you’re demanding, then what you are engaging in is wishful thinking, not thoughtful analysis.
You obliquely raised Rockefeller. If Standard Oil commanded such fearsome “monopoly pricing power,” that does not at all square with the historical fact that between 1870 and 1900, the price of kerosene dropped from $0.45 to six cents a gallon. Rockefeller cut costs consistently, a great benefit to consumers. Muckraker Ida Tarbell was daughter to failed oilman Franklin Tarbell, which is to say he was not nearly as efficient at serving the consumer as Rockefeller. By the time the radical revolutionaries forced their breakup of Standard Oil, the company had some 150 competitors. It was the oddest sort of monopoly imaginable and does not at all match the bogeyman in what passes for economic analysis by so-called antitrust theorists.
No, I would not break up these private companies. Such an act would be monstrous. I don’t care that it happened in the past. We can both agree on many terrible historical events that should never be repeated. Apple and Google do have competitors in the mobile market. They are nothing like kings.
No, I would not nationalize them either. If you think they’re slow, arrogant, and expensive now, in no conceivable universe do they improve in any of those categories as federal agencies. In the reality that we inhabit, they become worse and impossible for private competitors to displace. It would be a terrible, terrible outcome.
Based on data from the BLS, labor union membership is not at all compelling. In 2025, only 11.2 percent of workers were represented by a union. Back out workers who are not union members but whose job is covered by a union contract, and the percentage drops to the single digits.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm
You don’t define what you mean by consumer rights. My conception is you get what you agree to or can bargain for and no one may point a gun at or otherwise mug another peaceful person. Rights are actions that other people and especially the state may not take against peaceful people. I suspect you’d lump in this right to negotiate with your category of consumer rights. Calls for so-called “positive rights” require other people to serve you and are really demands for special privilege. A right, properly conceived, requires others to do no more than to leave you alone.
> Historically speaking - we'll get there, but its going to get ugly first.
I realize I am far in the minority, but we are not the ones doing the ugly-making.