Copyright owners will push for the later, maybe even take a page out off Googles Play store licensing and outright prohibit hardware manufacturers of even dreaming about producing a device that doesn't enforce their draconian requirements. So hardware manufacturers get the hard choice of either going for the general market that expects things to work or going for a tiny market that is happy with some of the most popular services not working by design.
> So hardware manufacturers get the hard choice of either going for the general market that expects things to work or going for a tiny market that is happy with some of the most popular services not working by design.
Software is already here, particularly in social media (mastodon/SSB vs Facebook). That hardware eventually gets there seems to me an inevitability (arguably we're already at least partially there, as evidenced by the fact Purism/Pine64/etc exist).
I still don't see it as a problem, though, because an individual can have different technical interfaces (devices, OSes, etc) for different purposes.
Generally, I put my personal stuff on systems I understand/control.
For some things, like watching TV, I'm okay with going to Netflix because that transaction is expected to be transitory. If Netflix disappears or declares themselves a new world order tomorrow, I can simply unsub and no harm done.
Where things get problematic is when so much of someone's life is wrapped up in a mono-corporate cocoon (e.g. Amazon shipping things to your house and running your servers, or Google serving you search results + mail + maps).
> For some things, like watching TV, I'm okay with going to Netflix because that transaction is expected to be transitory. If Netflix disappears or declares themselves a new world order tomorrow, I can simply unsub and no harm done.
So much for your $1000 TV that had Netflix and only Netflix builtin, and will refuse to boot when the cryptographic check fails becaused you changed the string that points to http://www.netflix.com to http://www.notnetflix.com
Or when Netflix refuses to continue supporting their app on your device and so you are forced to upgrade, despite your device still being fully capable of running video streaming (like the Wii, and probably soon the PS3 and Xbox 360)
But your TV manufacturer still wants to provide Netflix to other users and Netflix decided to require all their devices to run its trusted code if they want to provide Netflix to anyone, whether you in particular want it or not. So your choice is to trash your existing TV and track down a manufacturer that doesn't have any support for Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Amazon Prime, etc. at all to buy a new TV that doesn't ignore your choice. With TVs you might be lucky since there is a large market for dump displays that avoid any TV related functionality anyway, of course there might be restrictions in the license between Netflix and the TV manufacturer to close that loophole too, maybe limiting sales of dumb displays to specific types of users.
