>Today we have marketing departments that say things such as “we don’t need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits.”

Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's.

This whole article has aged like milk. Or, more charitably; it's a snapshot in time of the worries of people a decade ago, many of which never came to pass. Since this article was written, SOPA failed due to an unprecedented public protest, encryption bans have sort of sputtered and gone nowhere, and the EU is legally mandating that iPhones run unauthorized software while iPhone buyers are clutching their pearls about it.

That last one is particularly revealing. You see, the security landscape for individual users is far bleaker now than it was back in 2011. A decade ago it did not make financial sense to hack the average user, and now it does. Regular users - or at least some of them - are the ones still prosecuting the War on General-Purpose Computing. Governments and copyright maximalists are on the side of keeping things open. The spymasters like being able to drop their 0days in plausibly-deniable unsigned bait apps, after all.

The case for copyright maximalists is less obvious. You might think that they'd prefer more DRM, because it makes things easier for them. And that's true up to a point. But there's also no way to standardize it. It just gives you monopolization everywhere. In fact, it's a repeat of the days of iTunes, where Apple had the entire music industry at their feet because they had so badly misjudged music downloads. The RIAA went DRM-free because it let them sell music the way they wanted to. And now we have Epic Games, one of the larger fishes in the game industry pond, trying to legally undermine the whole basis of the console industry so they can sell more Fortnite skins.

I do still think the section about copyright being fundamentally boring still holds water. But it's less boring than it used to be back when the US pulled everyone into TRIPS and WIPO. A large portion of today's media consumption is on platforms that don't actually pay their way, at least not to the liking of the copyright maximalists. The war they fight is not on general-purpose computing, but on accessible social video platforms; the ones whose creators are crushed under the burden of having to constantly validate their legality and complain rabidly about it.

This, too, has historical precedent. Google and Wikipedia were able to spook people into spamming their local Congresspeople out of passing SOPA/PIPA with a well-timed protest campaign. Going back further, while Napster may have had some of the most inept and hilariously bad legal argumentation[1], the public took their side - not the law's. When the public does care about copyright, it's almost always to weaken it or keep it from getting stronger.

Of course this could also just get swept up into World War IV: The Culture Wars, like everything else inevitably does. All the international treaties that were designed to make copyright untouchable had their days numbered the moment that right-wing populists tried to wrestle countries out of the global trade system. Hell, there's a Republican congressperson that's genuinely trying to sell the GOP on going back to 28-year copyright terms purely to pwn the libs over at Disney.

[0] There have been several notable instances in which really scummy mobile app marketing tactics have passed through App Review for whatever reason.

[1] No, seriously, they tried arguing that they should be legally treated like radio because once someone downloaded a full and complete 320kbps MP3 copy of one particular hit song, they might go out and buy the full album full of other tracks they don't care about.