If it weren't for the current administration, I'd say it's time for regulatory action.
The FTC wasn't doing their job between 1980-2020 because of their ridiculous standard of, "if it doesn't raise consumer prices, it must be allowed." This lead to massive consolidation in many industries which of course ended up raising prices and hurting consumers anyway.
Recently they've had some wins but overall they're still failing to do their job.
are there any books or good articles with good sources about this? I'm very interested in what happened in the 80s through the mid 90s.
Because the Democrats were better at keeping them on a leash? No. Clinton was in charge 30 years ago and blew it.
> The Department of Justice, now under Bush administration attorney general John Ashcroft, announced on September 6, 2001, that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
The old model where the user decides which software or apps to run on their machine, is basically already replaced by a whitelist system that is managed by companies who have no interest or obligation to approve developers. Factors like ”being an individual”, an open source developer or god forbid reside outside the USA, you rely on a combination of L1 support doom loops, unjustifiable high recurring prices, kafkaesque and changing requirements, internal inconsistencies. Windows is the worst, but all platforms (except Linux) suffer from this and you can and will get hurt, delayed, and gaslit. If you haven’t, it’s just a matter of time.
I have been blocked for 6 months now with Digicert code cert renewal, for my app Payload, which will never get any media attention. The app doesn’t matter though, the approval process is per-entity (usually, a company). The point is that nobody gives a shit, because they have a monopoly/cartel and they start the validation process after they take your money.
If you are not an app publisher, the best way I can describe it is the ”pre-let’s encrypt” era of SSL certs, but more expensive, strict and ambiguous. In fact, I’ve never gone through any worse approval process in my life, and that includes applying for residency in two countries, business licenses, manual tax filings etc.
You can/should write your congressman (or whatever they are called in your country) and get better laws in place.
More specifically, it used to be feasible to distribute software between me (the developer) and my customers (the users) without a mandatory gate keeper that looks at me and decides whether I’m worthy, am from the right country, have good intentions etc. This is currently necessary on all desktop and mobile platforms except Linux. There is exactly 1 gatekeeper per platform (the platform owner who controls your device), except windows, which effectively have like 3-4 CAs that’s shrinking every year due to mergers and private equity ownership.
Software curation and reputation systems can be good, either with whitelists (say steam) or blacklists (say antivirus). I can see some use cases for it, but they should be within user control. What we have now is worse than a fearmongering Stallman rant. It’s incredibly bad, both pragmatically and philosophically.
2) they got 120,000 views, 400 retweets, and 1.7k likes in ~12 hours. that is a good amount of awareness. certainly more than i would get from a tweet. certainly more help than whatever you are doing here.
ah, well thank god you came in here and set them straight.
i am sure the veracrypt maintainer is appreciative of your service.