You Need to Own Your Technology
Do you actually own the music you listen to? Movies you've purchased? The phone you use? The car you drive? The answer to all of these is increasingly becoming no, you only rent them. As tech companies push everything from movies to cars into a rental model instead of acknowledging that things we buy belong to us, we risk becoming serfs to technology. This has huge repercussions for us as individuals, but also creates an extreme risk for businesses that no longer have control over the tools they depend on.
Do you actually own the music you listen to? Movies you've purchased? The phone you use? The car you drive? The answer to all of these is increasingly becoming no, you only rent them. As tech companies push everything from movies to cars into a rental model instead of acknowledging that things we buy belong to us, we risk becoming serfs to technology. This has huge repercussions for us as individuals, but also creates an extreme risk for businesses that no longer have control over the tools they depend on.
Android phones were historically a better option for free software than the walled garden of Apple's iOS ecosystem, because anyone could install their own code on their phone. This helps kids learning to program, hobbyists working on new mobile app ideas, and anyone who wants to use the device they paid for in the way they want. You bought your phone, you should be able to do exactly what you want with it, right? But unless the consumer pushback is too significant, in September of this year Google will remove the ability to use the phone you purchased the way you want. One of the worst parts about the way Google is approaching this is that they're pushing this update out to existing phones. A physical device you already bought will suddenly stop working in the way you expected, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Media has been going this direction for a long time. Thanks to a thoughtful birthday gift, I've been listening to records at home lately. If you're old enough to remember vinyl, or young enough to have gotten into it because it's retro, you know putting a record on a turntable just works. As we moved to CDs, DVDs, and BlueRay, even though manufacturers tried to gate players by region, you still own your music and movies. If you could play a movie on DVD twenty years ago, that same DVD player will still play that same movie today. Now with digital streaming, even if you digitally “purchase” a movie instead of just streaming it, the company you bought it from can decide to remove it from their catalog and take it away from you, like Sony did recently.
This idea that we only rent our technology is becoming more popular with tech companies. Many big tech companies have moved to subscription models, forcing users to rent software for a monthly fee instead of owning it for a one-time cost. Car companies have started locking down features behind a subscription that were included when you bought the car. This means you can buy a car that has certain features and have those features not work, or be arbitrarily taken away from you later with a software update.
In business this presents a huge risk. If your company is completely dependent on software that you have no control over, you can't accurately plan for future costs. You can see a version of this problem in companies that build their entire product on another company's platform, like the facebook gaming craze of the late 2000s to early 2010s. When facebook changed their rules, the entire market dried up. If your entire business model needs AWS hosting and their cost goes up 10x, what happens? If your entire design workflow is locked into the Adobe Suite on a subscription model and the price doubles, what happens to your profit? Where dedicated hosting and one-time purchase software were understandable costs, now you're completely at the mercy of another company.
We stand to lose connections to history and culture as we lose our media, and much more than that as we lose the ability to use our phones, cars, and other technology in our life. Imagine your phone only allowing you to listen to music from certain bands. Or your car only allowing you to start it if you were navigating to an approved location. This sounds Orwellian, but is exactly what can happen if we continue allowing tech companies to treat our purchases as rentals instead of ownership.
Thankfully there's still some sanity in this area. There are right to repair initiatives in most states and John Deere recently settled a lawsuit for artificially locking down their equipment to prevent farmers from repairing it normally. France realized the issues with ceding control of your technical stack to a single company, and is planning to move government computers away from Microsoft to run on Linux and other open source software.
Whether you're trying to listen to a new album or sign off on a purchasing decision for a Fortune 500 company, consider what you're actually getting for your money. Are you getting the thing you're buying, or just a temporary agreement to use it until someone else changes their mind? I'm hopeful that more focus on digital ownership will lead to better outcomes for all of us. When you buy something, it should actually be yours.
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