We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

Both lobby for and are in major political cahoots with many governmental bodies worldwide. They lobby like crazy, and can defend just about any lawsuit that comes their way - including dodging congressional hearings, selectively adhering to laws other companies cannot afford to skip, etc.

But I think you knew that. Being argumentative with the general point OP was making doesn't solve anything and just defends multinationals when they shouldn't be defended.

Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people.

YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from.

Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know.

It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.

The USA military, and secret services were, and still are, at the behest of "American business interests"

See also the Oil industry, and Donald Trump's remarks aimed at the Australian government that might "curtail the tech companies" [1]

1 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebo...

Do you know how many people use Google, Apple or Meta for every single sign on for every app/website they use?

Apple and Google are still a problem, but they are a secondary problem.

The problem right now is that even if I had a couple of million dollars lying around, I STILL couldn't reliably get a piece of hardware certified for the cellular network. I would have to set up a company, spend untold amounts of money bribing^Wwooing cellular company executives for a couple years, and, maybe, just maybe, I could get my phone through the certification process.

The technical aspects of certification are the easy part.

The problem is that the cellular companies fully understand that when it happens their power goes to zero because they suddenly become a dumb pipe that everybody just wants to ignore.

That's why this will take legislation.

It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures.

Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult".

And would any corporate AI allow that?

We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.

While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field.

It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.

Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.

You can feed it assembly listings, or bytecode that the decompiler couldn't handle, and get back solid results.

And corporate AIs don't really have a fuck to give, at least not yet. You can sic Claude on obvious decompiler outputs, or a repo of questionable sources with a "VERY BIG CORPO - PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL" in every single file, and it'll sift through it - no complaints, no questions asked. And if that data somehow circles back into the training eventually, then all the funnier.

The sheer technical difficulty is what makes this kind of thing impractical.

The network does validate that a SIM card is a real SIM card, but you can put a "real SIM card" in anything.

And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.

Yep. They control our information - how we make it, what we are allowed to find, and what we can say. And they are large enough to not face real competition. So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations they are and regulate heavily. Smaller companies can be left unregulated. But not companies worth 500 billion or more.

Sometimes owner control, cf. corporate control, can be had by sacrificing hardware functionality, i.e., features, closed source drivers. Choice between particular hardware feature(s) working and control over the hardware in general.

Since nations can be really small, I don't agree.

The M1 Macbook Air is 5 years old now, has an active development, lots of community funding and attention, yet is still missing basic functionality like external monitors and video decoding. Because it's just a mammoth task to support modern hardware. Unless you have a whole paid team on it you've got no hope.

To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US.

The UK going after Apple, only to get rebutted by the US is the most simple instance of it. International treaties pushed by the US strongly protecting it's top corporations is the more standard behavior.

Any entity fighting the duopoly is effectively getting into a fight with the US.

I haven't heard much from the major projects yet, but I'm not ear-to-the-ground.

I guess that is what is disappointing. It's all (to quote n-gage) webshit you see being used for this, and corpo-code so far, to your point.

If this is true then why is Tim Cook visiting Trump? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.

I'm not sure innovation is really impacted when restricting the private sector. Traditionally, innovation happens in public (e.g, universities) or military spaces.

There is a whole antropologic field around that, but to keep it short, if you pay your palace and all expenses with the money funneled to you as gifts, you're not the one in control.

Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them accountable.

Without that fraudulent marketing, Android never would have crowded out other options so quickly in the marketplace.

The solution is to either have Google back down on breaking its promise that Android would be open or to have an antitrust lawsuit strip Android from Google's control.

Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk.

Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height.

Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.

> building those alternatives is basically impossible

For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook.

Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources.

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

https://www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-wo... https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchme... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesl...

Company aims for profit.

Bigger scale allows for better efficiency.

So companies naturally grow big. The bigger they are, the easier for them to compete.

Big companies have access to tremendous resources, so they can push laws by bribing law makers, advertising their agenda to the masses.

There's no way around it, not without dismantling capitalism. Nations will serve to the corporations, no other way around.

There are natural boundaries of the growth scale, which are related to the inherent efficiency of communications between people and overall human capability. Corporations are controlled by people and people have limited brains and mouths. I feel that with AI development, those boundaries will move apart and allow for even greater growth eventually.

If only it were so. But it's not just that. It's also a question of which section of society has the power to demand or prevent the creation of such a system.

Whether enacting labor protections or the Magna Carta, these beneficial restrictions require some leverage. Otherwise what is overall beat and fairest won't be coming up.

My guess would be that it's a continuously moving target. There's no point in spending years working to support some weird integrated wifi adapter+battery controller when by the time you're done the hardware is already obsolete and no longer being manufactured. Repeat that for every device on the phone. The only ones who can keep up with that pace are the manufacturers themselves. It'd be different if there was some kind of standardization that would make the effort worthwhile, though.

A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again, which they can afford to do because it's such a small market. Exercising arbitrary power is not the trump card you think it is. Hell, even a tiny nation with reasonable but annoying (from the point of view of a corporation) laws may not be worth it to deal with.

Cellphones are not very useful as programming tools (too small), which is what Open Source excels at.

Also, cellphones need to handle some annoying things, like it should always be possible and easy to call emergency services. Which is to say, the UI work seems stressful.

How is it going to do that without testing (and potentially bricking) hardware in real life?

>It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures

I don't know why you would use an LLM to do that. Couldn't you just distribute the binaries in some intermediate format, or decompile them to a comprehensible source format first?

Yes there is, the population passing laws to regulate this. The problem is though, that most people don't understand and don't care enough until its too late.

I was part of this problem. I've accepted what Apple is doing because I had Android. I didn't think they'd come for me next so I didn't speak up

www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries

techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen

www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy

EDIT: Now in plain text since the last URL does not show up otherwise. And why is it rendering with --, its only - in the URL?

Because the number of non-Google and non-Apple phones is a rounding error.

And why is that? Because, except for the incumbents, it is almost impossible to certify a phone.

We could have nice sub-$100 phones (remove camera, etc.) if people could get them certified. But they can't; so we don't.

Not a legal argument, since Apple never claimed the iPhone was anything else but a walled garden, and walled gardens are legal as long as you are clear that users will be buying into a walled garden from the start.

(For example: Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox)

Legally, the only thing you could do is change the law to make walled gardens illegal, as they did in the EU.

The changes Google has proposed for sideloading are illegal under existing law, since Android was sold to consumers with the promise that it was the "open" platform that allowed users to run anything they like.

If they were state owned, we could vote for how the profits get used and we would have larger budgets for healthcare and education.

It really feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here. The point was that they seem to be impervious to many governments. That would be having, by at least some measure, more power than the government.

They weren't meaning they were literal comparisons of amounts of power.

They're graphical consumer devices, the quality bar is so high nobody can reach it except huge well funded teams. It's like asking why desktop Linux doesn't still attract OS builders, or for that matter, why the PC platform doesn't attract OS builders. Occasionally someone makes an OS that boots to a simple windowed GUI as a hobby, that's as far as it gets now.

A lot of these HN discussions dance around or ignore this point. When people demand the freedom to run whatever they want, they never give use cases that motivate this. Which OS do they want to dual boot? Some minor respin of Android with a few tweaks that doesn't disagree with Google on anything substantial (Google accepted a lot of PRs from GrapheneOS people).

Nobody is building a compelling new OS even on platforms that have fully documented drivers. There's no point. There are no new ideas, operating systems are mature, it's done, there's nothing to do there. Even Meta gave up on their XROS and that was at least for a new hardware profile. Google did bend over backwards to let people treat phones like they were PCs but it seems regular Android is in practice open enough for what people want to do.

And often the influence of an organisation is related to the state willing to back it. The US intervening for Tesla for instance. And China Petroleum wouldnt be so big if it wasnt for the chinese state.

I don't understand why everybody is ignoring existing, working GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone. The former is my daily driver btw.

Legislation, as you say, seems like it'll be necessary :/

It will disadvantage you in life in ways which are hard to quantify for a single person (you don't know what you don't know) but will be measurable in aggregate.

Point being, also states can do murder.

This is dogma, not proven fact, and most people that argue this tend to use self-serving metrics and a tailored definition of "efficient". Some counterexamples: early Google was much more efficient in responding to market changes than the current top-heavy organization; small hospitals tend to have better health outcomes (both per patient and per dollar) than large chains. Tesla was able to innovate much faster than established behemoths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Omar_Assad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Sayfollah_Musallet

There are good examples, though—you can produce a single gold ring a lot cheaper than you can produce a one-of-a-trillion of them, cuz at some point you simply run out of gold. Another example is running into a cap in demand. Classic sigmoid vs exponential patterns.

States are neither good at innovation nor dynamism.

But they are very good at telling you what you should and should not do.

The latter part has some wonderful consequences for consumer or worker protections, but it has some terrible ones for creating new stuff or improving the old.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Another $1.3 trillion on wealth transfers from workers to non workers (including disability). And another $608B on wealth transfers from people with higher income to people with lower or no incomes.

Alphabet and Apple, combined, earned $193B in 2024, from the entire world.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...

How does your suggestion make any difference, other than destroying 2 of the very few organizations driving demand for US assets, and hence help support the US dollar's purchasing power?

When you chose to create an open platform with multiple participants, you are creating a new open market where antitrust laws will apply... even to you as the platform creator.

Microsoft, for example, was found guilty of antitrust in the personal computer market long after the original computers running Windows were gone.

“Power” meaning the infliction violence and physical coercion with the force of law.

“Power” meaning the ability to make money by designing products and services people voluntary trade for.

This is always an intentional confusion intended to deceive and manipulate.

See also https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/economic_power_vs_politic...

Personally, I think a usable pure Linux phone is required to weaken the desktop vs. mobile distinction and break the lock-in. This would additionally empower the desktop platform, confirm it as baseline.

My line of thinking is that AI essentially is really good at breadth-based problems wide knowledge.

An operating system is a specific well-known set of problems. Generally, it's not novel technology involved. An OS is a massive amount of work. Technical butrudgerous work.

If there's a large amount of source code, a great deal of discussion on that source code, and lots of other working examples, and you're really just kind of doing a derivative n + 1 design or adaptation of an existing product, that sounds like something in llm can do

Obviously I'm not talking about vibe, coding and OS. But could an OS do 99% of that and vastly reduce the amount of work to get a OS to work with your hardware with the big assumption that you have access to specs or some way of doing that?

Does the good outweigh the bad?

Perhaps in the beginning. Today? Definitely not.

> A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again

US CBP and ICE would like a word with you.

Eh, Redox probably counters your statement here. It's just in that wide gulch of "the easy part is done and the hard parts are hard".

But it is being built, and some would definitely consider it compelling.

True "some small state fallacy" please. And here I believe it matters if we are talking about some small state, or a small state that happens to be a close ally with lots of influence for various reasons.

I asked "in what way the companies are state-owned?"

(though not so much with Xbox any more due to the way how Microsoft is trying to bridge the gap with Windows)

− but I'm not willing to pretend that for the very personal computers that smartphones are.

As was Windows RT on the original Surface tablet.

Nobody is forced to buy into a walled garden.

In those examples, nobody did.